


4.03: Sure Bet

by Amand_r



Series: Torchwood, Season Four [5]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-10
Updated: 2010-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-12 13:51:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dead body and a poker chip lead the team undercover in a high stakes investigation, and nothing is guaranteed, not even loyalty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	4.03: Sure Bet

_Laissez les bons temps rouler._  
\--"Let the good times roll" (Cajun French)

 **Rick:** How can you close me up? On what grounds?  
 **Captain Renault:** I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!  
 **Croupier:** [hands Renault a pile of money] Your winnings, sir.  
 **Captain Renault:** [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much. [aloud] Everybody out at once!  
\--Casablanca

 

"Oi, get 'is feet."

"I got his feet, I got 'em."

"If you 'ad 'em, I wouldn' be tellin' ya ta get 'em."

The dog lifted its head and froze, watching the two-leggers move the big thing across the alley. They kept coming closer and closer, and it wasn't sure if it should leave and come back later, or defend its territory. For now, it just watched.

"You're one for big orders when the man isn't about."

"Jus' shet up an' carry 'im. 'E's 'eavy."

The dog backed further into its box when the two-leggers passed, the thing swinging between them, back and forth.

"Where'd he say we should put 'im?"

"Down."

"Down where?"

"'ere's as good a place as any, I say. I need me a nibble."

"Are you off your rocker? Do you know what—"

"Drop 'im."

The dog took a moment to sniff the air. The two-leggers smelled like the creatures that lived Below, and like blood and cheese.

"You know Torchwo—"

"Fuck Torchwood, and fuck their little cunt'air of a leader. Drop 'im."

The dog bolted when they dropped the thing they were carrying, trying to use the distraction to make it past, but something caught it by the fur. The two-legger picked the dog up by the scruff of its neck, peering into its eyes with his three gray ones. The dog shivered.

"Oh. Yum."

* * *

 

There were a lot of things to be said for not being in charge. One was that Jack got a day off, days that he spent away from the Hub, on Gwen's orders, tooling about, haunting cafés and bookshops, sometimes going to the cinema and watching three films in a row and eating popcorn with synthetic butter. His paperwork was a third of what it once was. He didn't have to yell at UNIT anymore, unless Gwen asked him to. He and Lois had a water gun fight in the Hub one-day and no one looked at him and said, 'You're supposed to be the boss.' Sometimes he had to ride in the backseat, which, let's face it, that part blew.

He liked that he still didn't have to order any of the food, and Lois still called him Captain Harkness and gave him a lot of room, but Maggie and Gretchen didn't know any better. And Deirdre, well, Deirdre was a pain in his arse, and he was torn between wanting to go to the range and punching her in the gut. It was a toss up most days.

The first morning he'd woken up in his new quarters, he'd heard her voice, saying, "Good morning Captain," and opened his eyes to find her head peering over the hole in the ceiling at him, smiling wryly. He'd barely had time to raise his hands when she'd dumped a glass of cold water on him and smiled. "You've been hazed," she'd said. "Welcome back."

When her head had disappeared from view, he'd been spluttering and clutching his chest because, while the water had been cold, it had been something else that she'd wanted to remind him of. And for whatever reason, and she'd been successful. Gallons of wet cement were nothing like a cup of ice water, but the first slap had felt identical, and he'd known that later he was going to have to play this game with her. It would probably end with Gwen interfering, or something else, or--

"Uhm, hello there again, uhm, sir," Lois had warbled, eyes darting from his face to his naked chest to the sides of the manhole, the ladder, as if she hadn't known where she was supposed to look. That would have been charming if he hadn't been shivering. "Dee is…I'll have breakfast and a coffee for you when you're—" She'd waved a hand and disappeared from the hole. Jack had flung the covers back and swung his legs over the side of the damp bed when her face had appeared again. "And good to have you back, Captain." When he had looked back up, her face had been red and she'd been staring at his buff form. "Oh… sorry." Then she'd gone for real, he'd figured. Ah, something to be said for the ladies.

No matter how good Lois's coffee and how fresh her bagels, that had been a shit wake up.

Gwen remained blissfully unaware of the divide there, or perhaps, Jack suspected, willfully unaware of the divide. It was something that he would have told a subordinate to get over, and after her initial "hazing", Dee was almost solicitous at times, and Jack wondered if this was something that was going to come to a head or smooth out, like frosting.

Still, when he'd shot her in the face with the water gun, she'd taken it like a champ.

All of that said, in the field they got along like houses on fire. Especially, sometimes, like now, when the house was literally on fire, Jack considered as he watched her paint the wall with a blowtorch and walk into the adjoining room.

"I think you would do well to shag her," Ianto said from out of nowhere.

Jack checked the last of the ventilation shafts. "I'm not going to shag her."

Ianto tsked. "I would."

"You would not. You would pine from afar."

Ianto stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and looked affronted before shrugging. "I do like the pining." There was a whooping noise from the other room, and Jack suddenly felt very warm. The flame licked around the corner and curled one beckoning finger as if to say, 'This way.' He was about to turn to Ianto and tell him to get out while he could, but the other man simply raised one eyebrow and ran his hand through Jack's torso.

"Funny thing about being dead," he said lightly. "You know I'm just here to torment you, right?" Voice light, chipper.

Jack glanced at the daises on the wallpaper going up in flames, a sunny field blazing like a brushfire. "Oh yeah."

"Harkness, stop playing with yourself and get out of here," Dee called back at him and he shook himself, blinked at the empty space where Ianto had been and followed her, jumping past the fire and marvelling that he hadn't gone up in flames.

Dee was long gone from the house, and he skipped out the back door into the small dilapidated garden, where Dee was mopping her face with a handkerchief and standing next to Maggie, both of them watching the building burn. Inside there was a quiet squealing as the Glom trapped in the glue of the wallpaper burnt to death.

"That was brilliant," Maggie said. "I wonder what other kinds of deadly creatures are lurking in the construction materials of Cardiff."

Jack wiped his face with Dee's handkerchief, which turned out to be part of an old t-shirt. "You just say this because you want to set more things on fire." Already they could hear the wailing of the fire engines in the distance. Good thing. This set of flats was a separate abandoned building, but if it was allowed to burn unrestrained, it could ignite the one on the right, which was inhabited.

Maggie lowered her scanner and nodded. "Guilty. Also, we're done here."

They made it to the SUV and pulled away just as the engines arrived, and it was convenient because Jack quite hated leaving fire behind him; fire was too unreliable a weapon. He turned down one street and began the twenty-minute drive back to base when Maggie's scanner chirped and she checked it.

"I'm getting a tick," she said from the backseat. "Just around here."

Dee wiped at her hands with a wet cloth and tossed the refuse in her gear bag. "Can't hurt to check it out, right?"

"Reading's this way," Maggie said, and Jack turned the SUV to the left, into an alleyway three blocks from the burning building. It was populated with some cardboard boxes and a skip that looked to be half-empty, but in the headlights, he could make out an arm on the ground behind the rusted metal.

Dee checked her gun again and reholstered it, but left the guard off. Maggie got out of the backseat and Jack held out a hand for the scanner. "Just let me check this out first," he murmured. And to Dee, "Call it in, let them know we've been waylaid."

The alleyway smelled like the best of Cardiff alleys: piss, rotting food, cement that had been painted in rubbish and then scraped, only to be buried in more rubbish, so that there was a half-centimetre of squelchy muck under his feet. He skidded for a moment, even with the traction of his CAT boots, and almost had to steady himself on the edge of the skip. He pulled his gun and used the mini mag-lite Dee had mounted on it to see better.

The body wasn't moving, and the hand was slick with blood, red but smudged, as if someone had got their hands in it when they had grabbed the wrists to drag him. Jack was betting that even if there were prints and not just glove marks, they wouldn't be traceable. People weren't that dumb. Well they were, and they _had_ left the body right here…

He leveled his gun at the corpse and turned the corner of the skip widely, swinging the gun up at the last moment to belly-level just in case there was someone crouching behind the skip with the body. There wasn't. Just a body, and it was dead. Doornail dead. Pinewood sleeping bag dead.

"It's clear," he said, running the scanner up and down the corpse as he stood next to it. The readings were pretty low, but significant for a body, or any living thing. He might be a Rift refugee, or someone the Rift had once abducted and redeposited, or maybe a victim of something that had just come out from the Rift. The possibilities, well they weren't endless, but they were more than one, and that was frustrating.

"What is it?" Dee said behind him, and he glanced back into the headlights to see them both tromping towards him, Maggie's trainers slipping for a second before she recovered. Dee had the balance of a linebacker.

"It was a person," he replied. "Now, not so much." And he ran the torch up and down the body to get a better look at what was in front of him.

The body was emptied of organs and the top of the skull was missing, the brain gone, so that the man's head looked like a grisly eggcup.

"Is that…oh." Behind him he heard Maggie retching, and the sound of crushing cardboard—she had the grace to vomit out of the way. Kudos to her.

Dee shuffled up to the body and clapped her handkerchief over her mouth. "Jesus."

Jack squatted and tried not to look at the vacant eye sockets as he patted the man down, searching for a wallet. There was none, but in one of the front trouser pockets there was something hard and flat. Round. He pulled it out and turned it over in his palm, blinking at the poker chip with the winking woman on it, and around the rim in bright white print: Lady Luck.

"Lady Luck," Maggie mumbled to herself as she fitted the poker chip into a scanner that had no name (she'd been toying with calling it 'Mike'), and doing a scan that would test it for embedded toxins under the surface. Yeah, it was a scan that she should have done right away, except that Mike had been self-servicing and therefore unavailable, and also, she hadn't thought of it. It was probably a safe bet ( _Oh dear god, the betting jokes had started already_ ) that it wasn't poisoned or even, say, the cause of the man's death, mostly because she was hard-pressed to think of how a poker chip could dress a human like a freshly killed deer.

On the other hand, if the poker chip was responsible for something like that, She Who Had Been Handling It All Morning would quite like to know.

She blinked at the chip through the monitor screen that shone into Mike's innards, and selected the tox scans she wanted (All). The name around the rim of the chip nagged at her in that irritating way, like when she saw an actor on the telly but forgot where she'd seen him before.

There was a knock on her door, and Lois popped her head in. "Are you available for a little follow-up? I want to get these reports sorted and Dee and Jack already gave me theirs."

Of course they did. Jack didn't sleep, and Dee didn't have a poker chip to run a billion ineffectual tests on. Maggie rolled her stool to her desk and dug about for the sheath of papers that she'd got the night before, with the full intention of filling them out. She just hadn't got to it yet.

Lois took it from her. "I'll do the general answers for you, but you'll have to do the specific ones." She came forward and peered at the chip through the scanner. "Gretchen sat in on the PM this morning with our guy at the morgue. I have been informed that the mortuary tech was new and almost vomited in the body cavity."

Maggie made a face. Hey, at least she hadn't vomited in the body cavity. Go her.

"Gretchen hates sitting in," she murmured, and it was true. If there was one thing that Gretchen hated, it was not being able to do her own autopsy, but early on she had determined that until she was proficient in human autopsy, it would be ridiculous and foolhardy for her to saw open any bodies they had and pretend that she knew what she was doing. So she sat in on any human post mortems they ended up with.

Gretchen was picking these things up at an alarming rate, which Maggie was sure shouldn't be surprising, since she herself now knew fifteen different alien alphabets and enough Belkadan to translate the funny poems they engraved on all their tech (her favorite so far being, _If you let this tool get hot, you will find it soon is shot. Keep it cool what e'er you do, and it will always work for you._ Too bad the tool in question had been a hand-held sonar device and also a victim of the Hub-fire.). Sometimes Maggie wondered if Lois slipped some sort of mental accelerant in their coffee, or if it was just Torchwood teasing out these things in them, untapped potential that it took working for a top secret agency to bring forth.

Lois sat on another stool and made a 'Woo' noise when it rolled back a few feet. She pulled a pen from nowhere (Maggie was sure she hid them on herself like ninja stars) and clicked it, looking at Maggie expectantly. "Just describe events as they happened from the time you picked up the signal to the time Captain Harkness left the car."

Maggie sipped her tea and tidied her desk while she talked, and Lois asked her the routine questions (What did the area smell like? Did any of the tech you were using at any time become unbearably warm to the touch? Can you speak any new languages that you had prior to been unaware of?), and they were just wrapping up when Dee came in and sat on the edge of the counter, a rag and a pipecleaner in her hand. She waited until Lois had reached a natural break in the questioning and then held up the pipecleaner.

"Do you still have that solvent that we were using to clean off the—"

Maggie opened a cabinet door and selected the appropriate bottle, tossing it to Dee in an underhanded throw.

"I'm hiding from Harkness," Dee said. "I didn't say that, and you didn't hear it, but something about breaking down the three AK-107s and replacing all the polymer grips with some sort of plastic from the future."

"That sounds like it's right up your alley," Lois remarked off hand.

Dee crossed her legs and pocketed the rag at the same time. "Normally it would be, but the man doesn't _shut up_. If I have to hear one more, 'You know, back in the trenches we used to cut our apples open first looking for Griswalds' story again I'm going to stab something vital." She paused. "What the fuck are Griswalds?"

Maggie stuck her finger in her tea. It was cold. "They're forty-fifth century pressure grenades," she replied. "I have three dead ones in storage."

Dee stared at her and narrowed her eyes, and Maggie turned away, digging for the tech she used to reheat her tea. There were advantages to being a tech with access to alien hardware, and commandeering a little bauble to heat beverages gone cold was one of them.

Lois's PDA beeped, and she pulled it from her jacket pocket. "Gretchen's on the Access road," she told them.

"You track us?" Maggie asked, even as she knew the answer.

Lois raised an eyebrow. "I make it my business to know every vehicle that hits the pavement outside," she said.

"And that is why she gets paid the big bucks," Jack said, lounging against the doorway, a plastic Starbucks cup in his hand. "Do they pay you the big bucks, Lois?"

Lois stacked her paperwork and clicked the edges off the desk to straighten them. Her pen was gone, probably secreted in some fold of cloth, a sleeve, so that she could whip it out and stab someone in the chest with it from across a room. Maggie had no idea when she'd decided that Lois was deadly with throwing knives, but she didn't want to think too hard about it, because the illusion was too great. "Muy mucho dinero," she said with a smile.

"What are we all doing in here?" Gwen asked, pushing Jack from behind so that he stumbled into the room. He sat on the last remaining stool and made eyes at Dee, which she ignored. Lord, he was antagonising her on purpose. On the other hand, now Maggie knew that he knew what Griswalds were. She was going to get him to help her build one.

Because making bombs was a great use of her time. Go Torchwood.

"I'm helping Maggie fill in some spaces on the forms from last night," Lois said.

Dee waved her bottle. "I'm getting cleaning solvent." She looked at her legs swinging under the counter. "And now I'm just sitting here."

Jack slurped the whipped cream from the bottom of his cup loudly and Gwen raised an eyebrow. "Oh me?" he asked. "I'm slacking off."

Gwen jumped up and sat next to Dee on the work counter and Maggie bit her lip. "Oh, right then. I just got off the phone with DI Swanson, who wants to know why Twun was speeding away from a four-alarm fire last night." She leant back and hit her head against the cabinets behind her. "I prevaricated."

Maggie waved her hands. "I'm waiting for Mike to spit out a tox screen."

Jack tossed his empty cup in the bin and Lois fished it out, clucking softly about recycling. "Do we pay Mike the big bucks, too?" Jack asked Gwen.

Gwen shrugged. "I don't know Mike," and Maggie immediately regretted a) letting everyone in here, b) naming anything in her lab and c) divulging the names of the things in her lab.

"Fine," Maggie said as they all smiled at each other and congratulated themselves on their wittiness. "Hur hur, look, I'm scanning that poker chip, the Lady Luck, who, if one looks at its previous owner, is not so very lucky."

"I've been meaning to ask," Lois said, "the words, 'Lady Luck.' I haven't been able to find any reference to any gambling establishment by that name in Wales, let alone Cardiff. Is there…why are you smiling like that?"

Gwen's face was rueful but amused and Jack was tightlipped, his eyes sparkling with merriment. He stared at Gwen, as if daring her to say something. "Lady Luck," Jack said finally, "do you remember?"

Gwen smiled. "We chased that thing everywhere." She sipped from her coffee. "It's a mythical casino that moves from place to place in Cardiff. Owen was desperate to find it."

Jack snorted into his coffee. "He would have been." And there was a moment of unplanned silence in the memory of Owen Harper because no one knew how to fill it. Maggie filled it by eating a hangnail.

"I was beginning to think it was a myth for real, like Shangri-la or Sasquatch," Gwen said, and when Jack glanced at her she rolled her eyes. "Okay, like the Loch Ness—Jack, you know it doesn't exist, stop making that face and taking the mickey."

Jack shrugged in a 'Hey, don't believe me' gesture, and Maggie wondered if they'd ever find out whether or not the Loch Ness Monster was real. That would be something. After all, there was a pteranodon right in this very building, why couldn't there be some prehistoric or alien creature up in the lake?

"So anyway," Gwen said, "It's this casino run by aliens, and word is they peddle in all kind of hinky things."

"Hinky being, of course, a technical term," Dee added. Gwen tossed her a look. "Is it run by blowfish?"

Jack waved a hand. "Of course!"

Gwen smacked her face and Maggie shook her head. She didn't know what Gwen's thing was with blowfish, but she despised them. Perhaps it was the suits, or the smell, or the freewheeling ways, or how they always seemed to act so indignant when Torchwood caught them. One they'd dragged back and shoved in a holding cell had screamed about his rights and the Shadow Proclamation for about five hours until Gwen had tasered him and had Dee toss him back out on the street, stripped of all his tech.

There was the clacking of heels in the hallway, someone running, and it could only be Gretchen, since she was the only one missing, and the only one who wore heels. Maggie understood the need for a little bit of lift now and then, but unless they were in the field, Gretchen's heels topped three inches every day.

"We have to stop having meetings in places that are not the conference room," Gretchen panted. "I went all the way up there, and then I ran down to the garage, and then I thought you were all in the eyrie, and then I had to beat Myfanwy off with a broom." Gretchen brushed a leaf from her hair. "I think she hates me."

Jack smiled and Gwen snorted. "Aw, Gretch, she hates everyone, trust me." He flashed his teeth. "I ask you, what rational being could hate this smile?"

Mike beeped and she had to shoo Lois away from the counter so that she could reach the readout monitor, and that made them all shuffle around looking for counterspace to set their drinks and arses. Maggie wasn't paying attention to them, so she didn't get to see the toppling cup of coffee, just hear it, and the resultant 'Oh!' from someone in a low whisper and then the hiss of frying electronics.

Toshiko Sato had referenced this phenomenon:

 _Sometimes, inheritor of my position, you will discover that you are working with, well, morons. Granted, they are very good at what they do, and some of them are very bright, and they all probably mean well, but they are always doing things like playing ball around sensitive equipment that can become unplugged or firing bullets off into Rift Manipulators with nary a thought as to what that bullet will do when it is lodged in sensitive technology from another galaxy that may or may not be on the fritz and is like to kill you all when it finally shorts out._

They mean well.

But they don't think, and so you have to be firm. Draw the line early. They are not to come into your work area and look for 'A little something to jam in that doohickey so that I can get better telly reception' or 'Summat to get the Insta-toastie unstuck from the toaster' or even ask, 'Hey, does this remove body hair?' They are not to laze about in the tech lab section of the Hub, or sit on surfaces where tech has been lying or will ever be lying _, because we know about residual particles (even if they don't), and that can never be good. And even if it is their arse, it will ultimately be your fault._

It's like having a cat. Be vigilant and firm and eventually they will learn. And it's a good excuse to have a squirt bottle of water about.

"Right," she told head-Tosh. "Everyone out," she said aloud. "Go play in the armoury if you want to continue flirting with danger."

She heard the sound of papers ruffling, someone trying to hide something they'd done, no doubt, and then the scraping of coffee mugs sliding off surfaces, and a little bit of squeaky shoes, Gwen's trainers, Jack's boots, the click of Gretchen's heels. Lois and Dee were almost always silent as the grave. "So we weren't meeting in here?" Gretchen asked somebody as they went down the short hallway.

On the other hand, Mike told her that the chip was toxin-free, so being turned inside out was looking less and less like a possibility.

"Tosh had a squirt bottle, remember?" she heard Gwen saying to Jack as they left the room.

"I always thought that was where she hid her vodka."

* * *

 

Maggie took her sweet time, which was what she was supposed to do, actually, and when she was ready to brief, it was lunchtime, so they all sat in the conference room around a huge pizza and in general made a mess as Gretchen started with the autopsy reports. It was heartening to see that no one was put off by the large photos of an organless man, at least not enough that they would pass on lunch. Lois faced away from the slides on the wall, but that could have been inadvertent.

"It was all actually fairly straight-forward," Gretchen was saying over her bottle of Lilt Zero. "This man, still as of yet unknown, was emptied of all internal organs, and very well. No tearing or ripping of tissues, everything cut with something sharp, like a scalpel, not a hunting knife or a carving knife." She shrugged. "They probably used the same type of equipment that I have in the lab, or they have down at the morgue. The cranium was cut open with a high-powered saw, judging by the ridging on the cross section, and the brain removed in much the same manner as everything else."

Dee cut her pizza with a knife and stabbed it with her fork. She wasn't fond of pizza, but she didn't want to be the only one eating from her packed lunch. Jesus, thirty-three and still caving to peer pressure. Worse, peer pressure with complex carbs.

"Our gentleman had no toxins or drugs in his system other than a negligible amount of alcohol. He had no diseases or conditions detectable in the blood, and no other signs of infirmity. Everything's pukka, unless you count, you know, the gaping holes." Gretchen pulled another slice of pizza onto her plate, and Dee wondered where she put it. Maybe she had a hollow leg or something. "I'll get the full mark up sent over when it's done, but that's the prelim."

Cooper tilted her head. "So he's just some poor man," she murmured over her bottled water.

Gretchen shrugged. "Dunno. Could be a baby eater for all we know. But he wasn't dead when they cut him open. At least, the parts that we have don't have a point of entry for a knife or bullet, he's clean of poisons and he certainly wasn't strangled. His spine's intact. So unless they damaged him and took the damage with them, then he probably bled out when they cut him open."

Lois tossed her napkin on her plate and Maggie threw her lunch in the bin behind her, gulping from a large thermos of something, probably tea. So much for everyone having iron stomachs; only Harkness forged on ahead, indicating the last slice of pizza in the box and pointing to Gretchen in a 'Do you want this?' gesture. She stopped to consider and then shook her head and he fished it out with his paw, crust sticking out of his mouth like a walrus tusk.

"Could this be about organ harvesting?" Cooper asked, pushing her plate away.

Gretchen shrugged. "That was what the coroner thought. Someone takes everything because they're in a hurry and aren't sure what should be taken, sorts the rest out later."

"Because those brain transplants are just so successful," Maggie muttered. "I'm getting one next week."

Gretchen blinked at her. "I didn't say I _agreed_ with it. Give the coroner a break. He doesn't know half of what we know."

Dee finished half of her pizza and covered her plate with her napkin. Harkness watched with interest until she glared. "And really," she grumbled at her fingers, "what do we know?"

Maggie slapped her hand on the table. "We know that I am amazing and you should all fear me." She stood and reached behind her for her things, placed well out of the way of possible flying sauce and cheese. "And by the way that's pe, aitch, three, four, ar."

They all waited and she rolled her eyes, continuing. "Lady Luck has an extremely sophisticated chipping system, and some things are tracked quite closely. Like this little guy." She held up a bag with the chip in it. Dee could see the little spades that rimmed the thing, and the white tracing of a woman's body in the middle, like those horrid mudflap women on trucks.

"Think of it this way," Maggie said. "This chip can only have come from the Lady Luck, not just because we couldn't paint one up, and pretend, but because it has directions. This chip is our way in," Maggie said, setting the chip on the table in its plastic evidence bag. She used her remote to start her slideshow. "Look what I found on the inside."

Dee squinted. "That's a little black square."

Maggie simply smiled and pointed the remote back over her shoulder, and the pictures slid one after another in a rapid progression of zooming in, something she'd obviously done for show. Ah, she deserved a chance to show off once in a while. "Disco."

The last image was a chip. A chip within a chip. Some sort of—

"Is that some sort of data chip?"

"Oh yeah," Maggie said. "Lookie what I found." The slide changed to an image of an advert, obviously, of two busty women, one of who was decidedly gray and not human, holding drinks and playing cards and possibly packs of cigarettes. Classy. The logo above them in a sweeping arc read "LADY LUCK!"

"The one on the left needs her roots done," Lois said critically, less to be mean and more to make a joke at what she thought would be an appropriate time.

"What you're looking at," Maggie told them, her face bright with satisfaction, "are directions, if you can read them, and the drinks are on the house, if I'm understanding this correctly, plus an invitation to the back room."

Harkness threaded his fingers together and stared at the image. "I'm guessing nothing good goes on in the back room at the Lady Luck."

"What _is_ the Lady Luck?" Lois asked. "Some sort of…floating alien casino?"

"I collected all the stray data we ever accumulated on Lady Luck," Harkness said, pressing the buttons on his remote uselessly and then giving up on it and fiddling with his wrist strap instead. The screens replaced the image of the Lady Luck advert with strands of code. He frowned. "That's not right."

"It's okay, Captain. I made a handout." Lois tossed a small pile of packets in the middle of the table next to the pizza box and they divvied them up. "I hope that's all right with you."

Harkness peered at the code on the screen. "I didn't order that," he mumbled. "They better not have charged that to my account." Then he noticed the papers. "Oh, what? Yeah, Lois. A life-saver, if not a tree-saver."

Dee studied the stapled sheet in front of her. There was a list of known possible locations that had been investigated, from the docks, to Roath, to all the way up in Caerphilly Castle. There was a long list of suspected underworld types associated with the casino, from a series of Pikey imports to a few blowfish (of course) and—

"There's a Welsh Mafia?"

Cooper rolled her eyes. "That was Owen's theory. I'm afraid Ianto might have…encouraged him."

Gretchen held up the paper. "Ricky the Mickey." She lowered the paper from in front of her face and blinked. " _Billy Two-times_. Billy two-times what?"

Lois smiled weakly. "You don't want to know."

Gretchen just shook her head. "I didn't realise that people actually _had_ these names, you know? I thought that was just in films."

"So we could raid this thing, then, right?" Cooper asked, looking up from her paper. "I mean, we have directions, we have a dead body, so obviously something other than Texas Hold-Em actually _is_ going on there."

Harkness closed the pizza box and collected everyone's plates, stacking everything on the top in a neat pile. It was almost…solicitous. Dee clutched her styro cup in her hand as he reached for it.

"Look," Gretchen said. "All we have is a dead body that just happened to have a poker chip on it." She handed Harkness her plate. "And if they went about killing their customers, as exclusive as they are, they wouldn't have anyone left."

"Actually, the chip is a voucher for about a thousand pounds, which I'm guessing you only get if you're invited to the special games." Maggie blinked. "No point in giving those out to everyone at the door. I don't think we want to know what goes on in the special games."

Gretchen waved a hand. "Perhaps we have evidence of what goes on in the special games."

"Or this could all be unrelated," Dee added, and they stopped to consider that.

"Right." Cooper nodded once. "Someone should go in there and see what's going on. If we barge in there we'll never be able to get in again, I wager, unless we get…lucky." She glanced about. "It's quite difficult to avoid gambling references, isn't it?"

Everyone was silent for a moment, probably trying to say something that wasn't, 'You bet' or 'That's right on the money.' It was funny how when one tried _not_ to think of something, it was suddenly all one could think about.

"Maybe they made him an offer he couldn't refuse," Lois offered finally. "No wait, that's Marlon Brando."

Harkness sat back and put his hands behind his head. "So, undercover work? I love undercover work."

Cooper nodded. "We could put you in there with some extra cash, give you a chance to get in on the big games. Wear a wire—" She stopped to smile as Harkness exaggeratedly clapped his hands in mock delight. "Yes, yes, and we'll—"

"You're joking," Dee grumbled. "They'll make him as soon as he walks in." She sighed.

Harkness smile melted into a bit of a frown. "I'm very good at cons."

Dee tried not to laugh. She truly did. "Maybe a billion years ago. Can you still count cards? How do you play baccarat?" She waved a hand. "So you have a nice smile and you look good in a tux. You move like a copper." She leant forward and tilted her head so that she was giving him what she hoped was her most determined face. "Worse yet, an honest copper."

Harkness's mouth twitched in the corner, and she knew he was trying to figure out how to take what she'd said as a compliment and argue with her at the same time.

She broke his gaze and sat back, drumming her fingers on the table. "You'd need someone more aloof. Cool under pressure. Someone who can lie for fun, not just necessit—what?"

Cooper was grinning from ear to ear, and that was disturbing enough, but Harkness was smiling into his hand, eyes still on her. Gretchen let out a bark of a laugh and it slowly became apparent.

"Oh no. No."

"We'll need a gown," Maggie said suddenly.

"Thank god she gets regular mani-pedis," Lois added pulling out her mobile and standing. Harkness's mouth was fully behind his hands now, and Dee watched Lois, _oooh you traitor, Lois_ , give her a brilliant smile. "I'll make some calls."

"Oh," Harkness said, lowering his hand. "Call Donatella Versace. She owes us a favour." And at Cooper's raised eyebrows, he shrugged. "Her pool boy was hosting a Kreplax parasite. We excised it."

"And you couldn't remember that when I was shopping for a wedding gown?"

"Hello," Dee said, standing, and they all looked at her. "I'm not doing this."

"Oh yes you are," Cooper said, folding her arms. "Dish it out and take it, Johnson." She gave Dee that smile that was icing over lead. Great. She was going to say the words. "That's an order."

Dee sighed but refrained from rolling her eyes. She was getting quite good at these displays of attitude. Someday they were going to backfire. "Fine."

* * *

 

They were in the conference room, sitting about with the remains of their tea, a very expensive dress and what Maggie figured was half of her wiring supplies when Gretchen started in on the badgering.

"The top part of this dress needs to be taped on," Gretchen told Dee, handing her a roll of double sided carpet tape. "You know, in case you accidentally, uhm, run or something. You don't want to show everyone your—" She gestured to Dee's breasts.

"Ta-tas," Maggie supplied. She wasn't a fan of carpet tape, but it did have its uses, and she was just glad that she wasn't the one who was going to be plastered into the extremely expensive and frightfully gorgeous Versace Atelier dress that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe over the course of her whole life. She'd only paid a few hundred quid for her wedding dress, and that had been a few hundred quid too many. Sometimes when she looked back on what happened, she didn't see the whole wedding as anything but a fucking waste. A waste of her parents' hard-earned money that failed to deliver in anything useful. Not even a grandchild to console them for having a widowed daughter.

Dresses made her maudlin. This explained the army of trousers in her closet.

Dee took the tape and sighed, sitting on the table and staring at the dress hanging on the back of the conference room door. "I had something like this years ago," she mused. "You need a few for balls, and the opera, and sometimes when you go to--why are you all smiling?"

Maggie hid her smile behind her equipment. Gretchen was less than couth. "You're all high society, Dee." She pulled a strip of tape off with a tearing sound. "I feel all grubby and unworthy of being around you, princess."

"Fuck off," Dee said, looking unworried. It was true. If Gretchen started a game of rough-and-tumble, Dee would wipe the floor with her.

"I dunno, Mags, if we ransomed her, how much do you think we'd get?"

"I think we might have to pay them to take her back," Jack said, leaning in the doorway. "Not that you're not lovely, Johnson."

She flipped him off. "You're not hanging out here while I try this thing on."

"I'm just here for my cover story," Jack replied, pulling his hands from his pockets and waving them in front of his chest, palms out. Maggie sorted through the thin plastic document keepers that she used to store whole fake identities and pulled out the one labelled 'Jack' and one labelled 'Deirdre'. She had stacks of these things, multiple identities for all of them.

They all usually had about three ID cards in their wallets at any given time, but sometimes they needed complete backgrounds, etc. Jack's accent usually guaranteed that she had to unearth a US Social Security number for him (There had been an event two weeks ago when he had sworn up and down that he could do a perfect Welsh accent, and then he'd followed her about the Hub for five minutes, waving his hands and saying things like, 'Oi 'ad a 'eck uv a toime, Marry Poppins!' until she had shut him in a closet and refused to let him out until he promised to never ever pretend to be Dick Van Dyke ever again.). It was one of the many things Maggie liked about her job—once when she'd been angry with Gretchen, she'd made her Octavia Pratley, sewer inspector, an ID that Gretchen'd had to use about a dozen times in the past three months when out looking for weevils.

They really didn't know how much they shouldn't mess with her, Maggie thought to herself.

Dee frowned. "I thought I was supposed to—"

"Jack is backup," Gretchen said, grinning widely. Maggie thought she was enjoying this way too much. On the other hand, this could be one of those times Maggie could take the piss out of Dee for fun. The look on Dee's face when she glared at Jack told Maggie that now was probably not a good time.

"It's not that we don't trust you, Dee-Dee," Jack said. "It's that you should have backup. Armed backup."

Dee shook her head. "Fine."

Lois wasn't here to diffuse the situation, so Maggie picked up the clue bat and whacked herself. "All right then, hot off the presses," she said, handing the red folder to Dee. "You are Annabeth DuChamp, a wealthy divorcee with high connections, a sizeable fortune and a healthy gambling 'problem'." She made finger quotes. "You're in Cardiff for business and you want to check out some serious action."

Dee peered at her photo. "I don't have to say any of that, right? I mean, I don't have to say 'I'm looking for some serious action'?" Jack opened his mouth and she raised her hand. "Don't, just don't."

Maggie ignored them and tried to get the schematics of the wiring she was designing to fit with the blocking of the dress, which was all swirly with peek-a-boo patches of skin, and her gridded program didn't like that. That was bullshit. This program was designed to help plan out wiring in houses. What would they do if the house wasn't all right angles?

She was going to design a program for fluid plotting of electrical wiring and fiberoptic cable, and then she'd be able to buy herself an Atelier dress. Just the one, probably.

"Here," she said, handing Gretchen a spool of wire. "Clip about seven five-centimetre lengths." Maggie figured she only needed three, but it kept Gretchen busy without having to waste too much wire. Gretchen took to the task with the enthusiasm of one convinced they were learning to diffuse bombs.

Jack fished out a laminated driver's license from his dossier. "Who am I?" he looked at the typeface. "Jacques LeStrappe," he read flatly.

"No," Maggie blurted, ripping the plastic card from his fingers and digging the additional one from his folder replacing it. "That was a test run on the equipment. For lolls."

"Lolls?"

"I thought it was el-oh-els," Gretchen mumbled around her mouth full of wires.

Maggie dug about in Jack's dossier, then handed him another card. "You are John Hanson, professional table games dealer from Omaha, Nebraska." She grinned. "Came to Cardiff chasing after a girl, got dumped and stayed around."

Jack peered at the license. "You have no idea how accurate that is," he murmured absently.

Dee hopped down from the table edge and smoothed one hand over the dress. "Do we have to give this back?" she asked.

Maggie blinked. The thought hadn't occurred to her. "Oh god, I hope not, since I have to rip up the inside," she said, and Dee gave her a look that might have had a little bit of horror in it. She shrugged. "I have to wire it for sound."

Gretchen laid the wires out flat and smoothed them on the table. "Hence the carpet tape. This is going to be heavy."

Maggie frowned. "Wire isn't heavy."

"The battery pack, then."

"It's a lithium disk the weight of a fifty P."

"Then the transistor…thingy…whatchama…" Gretchen drifted off when Maggie just tilted her head and stared at her. "This is one of those awesome alien tech things that is invisible and floats through the air?"

Maggie corrected her schematics with her light pen. "Not remotely."

Dee rolled her eyes again and stopped fingering the dress long enough to scoop up her dossier. "If Cooper asks, I'm at the range," she told Maggie and with one final glance at Jack and Gretchen, now using Maggie's wire to make some sort of conductor that would supposedly reheat coffee when taped to a battery, she left the room.

Maggie watched Jack and Gretchen bend over the wire, plastic boarding, and battery with a soldering gun and wondered what it was they did here anyway. And when Jack's fingers closed on Gretchen's as he showed her how to melt a miniscule bit of copper, the picture came into focus a little more.

Oh bloody hell.

* * *

 

Lionel tapped on his chin and watched the employees pull the chairs down from the rolling carts and set them in front of the felted tables. The place was going to open in an hour and the start up process was arduous. Always was when they had to go to a new location. But ah—it kept them in business, and custom never did have a problem finding them, not with the chips.

Humans were frightfully predictable and more than willing to part with their money.

And also fairly easy to addict to gambling, and then easy to separate from their internal organs. He had high bidders on those things.

"Nigel didn't ever come by, did 'e?" Sebastian asked, peering at one of the cocktail waitresses when she bent over to pick up some coasters she'd dropped.

"No," Lionel said, wondering where his erstwhile nephew and his small shipment of _'d'd'd'an_ laser scalpels were. The ones he had were losing their power, and so far he hadn't been able to recharge them using sources onworld here. Thing about Nigel though—ever since he got that hover car modded to take through the Rift holes, he'd been obnoxious with it. More than likely he'd got his projections wrong, skimmed the eyewall the wrong way and just tumbled right into the Rift. Or come out in the past. Or the future, or even worse, he'd come out some place too far away from the bay and dried out.

Or, if this were a film, he had met a more dastardly end, a mugging, or other violence, or possibly the barrel of a gun sanctioned by the crown. They'd been doing this on Earth, Sol 3 for years (well the gambling, the other things were new—it was a recession after all), and it was only a matter of time before they were caught. Lionel would have preferred to make a clean getaway. Maybe he should think about that a little more. Contingency and all.

"Useless piece o' shite, I say," Sebastian muttered, and then seemed to think better of insulting his boss's nephew, because his top eye twitched nervously and he shrugged. "I mean, y'know, this isn' th' first time."

He had a few orders to fill, and a hole opening tonight, Nigel or no Nigel.

Lionel turned his back on the casino, fingered the chip in his pocket and activated it, running his thumb around the rim. All the chips they'd sent out would play their message in subsonic frequencies for some of their customers, and buzz the coordinates to the new place in Morse code for their human ones. And of course, those with a right kind of tech could just read it right from the chip in the chip, but those people were few and far between on this world.

* * *

 

The firing range was well underground, and that was just fine with Dee. She'd asked that it be that way, so that she didn't have to worry about anything but the backstop, and if she had to fire something that she thought the range, which actually went on for about an eighth of a kilometer, couldn't handle, she used the countryside. That hadn't come up yet, though she had a few things she planned on trying out with a load of tannerite and an abandoned car.

She set out the headphones but dallied, running her hands over a series of very small guns that she might be able to hide under the dress. At this point Dee wondered why they hadn't been able to come up with a pen that was also a gun, maybe a hair chopstick that was a vibroblade or something. This was the second word Dee had used in her head from _Star Wars_. Maggie slipped them in every once in a while, and she would discover later when she googled things like 'transparisteel' that she was being directed to _Wookiepedia_.

Still, 'vibroblade' sounded very promising.

Meanwhile, on a planet very, very near and a galaxy not so far away, Dee was left with a series of twentieth-century firearms. The number of firearms _not_ from this planet that still worked was actually a bit of a let down. By the time they fell into her hands, they either didn't work, or they were low on power, and she hadn't the resources to charge them. Someday a universal adapter and power converter would fall through the Rift and she'd have a field day.

She might have even anticipated naming it by looking it up on _Wookiepedia_ , but they didn't have a word for something like that.

She heard Harkness before she saw him, talking quietly to himself. He did that sometimes. Dee wanted to ask Cooper if this was just one of those things that he always did, or if this was something new, in which case that was slightly worrisome. He only seemed to do it when he didn't think that people around could hear him, though sometimes he stopped in mid-sentence when he walked into a room where there were people. He didn't usually do it in public, though last night she had heard him in the house whilst she was torching it.

She wanted to ask everyone else, but she didn't like the idea that she was asking about Harkness behind his back; it looked odd. If Gretchen or Maggie or Lois brought it up, she'd talk about it, but she wasn't going to be the one to sit Cooper down in her office and say, 'Has he always been a bit of an air-mumbler? Because if not then you might have a problem.' Cooper wasn't an idiot, and on more than one occasion she had already tipped her cards to Dee (oh god, she was just gearing up for these gambling jokes, wasn't she?)—Cooper was a secret-hoarder.

She probably didn't think she was a secret-hoarder. She was probably one of those people who thought that they were frank all the time. But more than once in her tenure as boss here she'd played the "Oh? You didn't know that? I knew that weeks ago but didn't bother to tell you because I didn't think you needed to know" game. It upset Dee less than she had thought it would, especially since she was herself a master at hoarding secrets, but at least she didn't deceive herself about it. Dee was about a hundred and ten percent sure that Cooper probably prided herself on her honesty and openness, or rather, her _newfounded_ honesty and openness. The old Torchwood had been nothing but secrets and lies, she'd once said.

The white walls and open atrium and windows in the new Hub didn't fool Dee for a minute. They were on an Access road far far back from any other buildings, hidden in the hills and the hedges.

But even now she heard him coming down the hallway, probably thinking that she had the headphones on. "Yeah, look, you have to stop trying to fix me up with everyone. It's macabre." His boots started to come into sound, as well, and she bet that he had his hands in his pockets, sauntering. How did rubber-soled boots make that much noise? Not that she was arguing with the idea of knowing where Harkness was at all times, but it was like he put pushpins in the soles of his shoes.

"Ha ha. One of these days I will and then you'll act all miffed," Harkness said, and Dee laid out the last of the guns on the table. They were very small, and she wasn't in the habit of using them. It wasn't that her fingers were too big, but rather that she liked things that carried the maximum number of bullets without reloading, and a Webley just wasn't going to do it. Nor was this tiny Derringer.

"Oh, yeah, she's into me…" Harkness rounded the corner and the words died on his lips, a ghost of a smile on his face. Dee turned partially away from him, back to the range. If she ignored that he was talking to himself, then he wouldn't have to make some lame excuse.

"Yeah, Gwen, I'll get back to you," Harkness said, and fake-pressed his comm, pulling it from his ear.

Good save. She let it go, and that was her gift to him today.

Harkness—one of these days she'd think of him as Jack, but not yet—joined her at the table and picked up the Derringer, making the 'It's so ickle!' face. It was the face everyone made when they saw it.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "Miniscule. Your fingers would get stuck."

Harkness yanked his index finger from the trigger guard and shook it. "Seriously. Here's what I need," he said, picking up the Webley and petting it. "Hello, darling."

Dee smiled. "I bought it from eBay. Don't say that I never did anything nice for you."

Harkness flipped out the cylinder and peered down the barrel. "You haven't cleaned it?"

Dee rolled her eyes. "No. I don't like you that much."

Harkness knocked the cylinder back into place with a flick of his wrist and petted the gun just a little, as if it was more than a hunk of metal that projected smaller hunks of metal at deadly velocity. It probably was. "That's all right," he said, and then looked up at her. "Thanks."

She shrugged. "As long as you understand that you aren't allowed to take it into the field without a backup piece," she told him. "Six bullets isn't enough, and the team all use the same gun so that the extra mags are interchangeable."

Harkness set the Webley down and glanced at the Glock whilst he donned a pair of the safety glasses. "I know. It's very practical. Military." He picked up the headphones and slid them on, then spoke too loudly, probably so that he could hear himself. "Not Torchwood Three-esque," he concluded and then winced when his own voice must have blasted in his ears.

She slipped her own headphones on and smiled a bit. "The new headphones have mikes in them," she added. "Voice activated, so they don't pick up on gunfire."

Harkness picked up one of the Glocks on the table and ejected the magazine, then checked the barrel.

"And it's Torchwood One," she told him. It was a bad dig, she knew, but she was tired of being compared to the way they did it in old Torchwood. It didn't happen often, maybe once or twice since he'd come on board last month. In some respects, she could get that, as well. Harkness had been in that Hub under the Plass for ages. He was set in his ways. Some of his policies made sense, sure, Harkness wasn't stupid. Her old files had hinted that he'd seen action in more than one war, and there was even some speculation as to whether or not he'd seen offworld action as well.

But he'd come to prize the individual a little much. He'd kept Torchwood small (Cooper was the same way, and Dee was working on the whole 'We should have more people' thing), and indulged in a bit of non-uniformity that had encouraged creative thinking. That creative thinking was probably responsible for a lot of good things, but if it wasn't reined in, it caused problems. Like why was everyone using a different gun? Harper had used a SIG, and Sato a Glock, and if either one of them had run out of ammunition, they couldn't swap mags. It just seemed as if small things like this had fallen though the cracks.

Then again, that was her job, to think of this stuff.

So he got on her nerves, unnecessarily, and sometimes intentionally. It wasn't any worse than, say a glass of water in the face first thing in the morning.

Harkness slammed the magazine in and pointed the gun downrange, firing at least eight or nine times before pausing to peer at his target. They were weevil-shaped. Lois liked making them. She'd also had some made up to look like beavers, but they made Gretchen and Maggie whine about shooting the cute animals when they came down to clock time, so Dee left them in the drawer for when she was feeling particularly hateful.

"You and I have to work together," he said into the mike, almost lightly, as if he was commenting on the weather or the price of figs. "I don't know what we should do to make this better for us." He squeezed off the last of the magazine and ejected it, still looking at the target through his glasses and then back at the empty clip, as if something was bothering him, and he wasn't in the middle of starting something with her.

She pulled out some boxes of safety ammo and gestured with her fingers that he give her the empty mag. When he didn't, and instead turned the butt of the gun up to look into the underside, she tossed a full mag at him. It bounced off his arm and onto the floor, and he finally looked at her. She made the 'gimme' gesture.

"I think you're waiting for me to say something horrible to you," Harkness said, and threw the magazine. He picked the full one from the floor at his feet and slammed it home. "So I gave it thought." He blinked and smiled. "You are a cunt. I don't say that lightly."

Dee snorted and sat on the edge of the table, reloading the mag with Glaser rounds. "Whatever."

"Okay that was sexist, yeah," he admitted, turning back to the range. "You're a jerk, then." He unloaded the Glock into a weevil target. "Worse, you're a traitor, and it just _eats_ at you."

Dee stiffened, but it was easy to just keep thumbing bullets into the mag, so she did that.

"You had orders, and you turned your back on Queen and country," Harkness said breezily. He tossed the magazine away and loaded another from the table. "I know what you're going to say. They were bad orders." He unloaded another five rounds and stopped. "This die is badly-seated."

"Maybe you're a bad shot," she fired back without glancing up at his target.

There was a snort and she looked up to see him flashing her a smile. What was that? Pity? She was bad at reading these things.

"Being a soldier will eventually push you there, you know." He finished the magazine in eight clean shots. The weevil target was mostly ribbons now. "I'm a traitor, you're a traitor. Hell, only Mags and Gretchen are still innocent, and give them time, I wager." He took off the headphones and handed her the gun. "And I'm a great shot," he added, showing her those teeth again before patting her shoulder and leaving her in the range, holding his smoking gun.

* * *

 

Jack unwrapped a new deck and slapped the edge of it off the felt on the table. "Ladies and Gentlemen, the name of the game is Blackjack, twenty-one, vingt-et-un, pontoon. Ten pound minimum in the betting box please, and we'll be using the Cervantes rules."

The Wark at his table widened his eyes and Jack laughed to himself. The other players at the table chipped in and Jack started with his upcard, slapping cards face down as he worked, moving his arms and fingers so that they were deliberately open gestures. Nothing like being accused of hiding cards when you were on this side of the table.

Besides, he realised as three people looked at their cards, he liked blackjack. He peeked at his other card. It was a giveaway in some ways, but whatever, he had a soft seventeen, and so the rest of the game played out easily: stand, hit, hit, hey twenty-one to the little lady on the end.

It was a shame he wasn't going to be cashing out his tips, actually, since he had a nice tidy pile that would have got him dinner and a show for himself and someone else. He fell into the rhythm of dealing and wheedling people out of their cash, and part of him was a little irritated that Dee had said he couldn't con people out of money anymore, because here they were, just giving it up. All he had to do was smile and deal the cards and make jokes about the quality of the drinks.

After about another hour he hadn't seen Dee anywhere. He'd come in before her, well before her, so that part wasn't surprising. What was surprising was how easy it was to knock a dealer out, walk up to the front door (a warehouse in Penarth, what the hell was wrong with Torchwood that they couldn't suss that one?) and say that Johnny was sick, and Jack was his roommate and in need of work.

That they had fallen for it meant that they were suspicious, but they didn't know what brand of suspicious, so they kept him where they could see him, and they probably thought that if he did anything off, they could just take him out to the shed and put one in his brain pan. Or, you know, gut him with an ice cream scoop.

The casino was nice for a warehouse in Penarth, he had to admit, from the chandeliers and the track lighting in the corners, to the complex patterns in the carpet that he guessed were designed to make you so dizzy when you looked at them that you had to sit down in the nearest chair, and that nearest chair was probably always in front of a slot machine.

Or him, he guessed, when two of his players moved on and that just left him and the Wark, a sober, well-dressed and dim creature with three blinking eyes and the worst idea of what amounted to the number twenty-one in the universe. Good for Jack, bad for the knuckle dragging alien with sufficient upper body strength to rip Jack's arms off and play the bossa nova on his rib cage with them if he got angry enough.

He dealt the upcard and then gave the Wark two cards and one for himself. He had a pair of sevens, and that was pretty shit. He dealt once more, gave himself the five of hearts, and something for the Wark.

He didn't actually know what cards the Wark had, but it didn't stop him from speculating as he waited for the alien to stop counting on his three giant fingers.

"The best thing about this scenario is that you can't respond to anything I say," Ianto observed from his perch on the table, his arse right where the Wark was setting its drink so that every time it reached for the bubbling concoction, it had to stick its hand into Ianto's non-corporeal rear end.

Jack felt his eye twitch, a bad tell in a dealer, and which the Wark had decided was actually a tell and not Jack's involuntary reaction to Ianto inspecting the Wark's hand. "He has three sixes," Ianto said. "If he tells you to hit him, he might mean actually physically hit."

"Hit me," the Wark said, and Jack slapped the card down in front of him. Queen of spades.

"I stand corrected," Ianto remarked. "A raging moron."

Jack pulled the chips towards himself and let them freefall into the bin below the table, trying to make his hand gestures as obvious as possible for the eye in the sky camera above the table. That was another way to get your brain scraped out like a kid's empty bowl of pudding: convince the house that you were cheating them.

Jack saw the second Wark coming, stalking across the casino, and Jack's hands curled against the cards in his fingers, itching to go for the Webley at his calf (He didn't always have to listen to Dee, and the Glock was too big for his calf, for anyone's calf, really, and still be invisible, unless you were a Wark, maybe.).

The second Wark wasn't steamed at Jack, though. He only had eyes for the one sitting at Jack's table, and he reached up with one of his meaty paws and smacked the first one in the back of the head, sending his skull slamming down into the table, one of his tusks scratching the felt. "Oi, get back t'work."

His last player stood and shook himself, then lumbered off to the other side of the casino giving Jack a good look at the spines sticking out the back of his suit jacket. Jack shuffled the cards for fun and smiled at the new Wark, who was obviously some sort of bouncer. There were a few of them here, along with the voluptuous gray-skinned Qag waitresses. Warks, Qags and blowfish. Oh my.

"Is it always this slow?" he asked the Wark, trying to offer a winsome grin.

The Wark blinked at him with all three eyes. "'E comes back to yer table, you send 'im packin'."

Jack saluted with two fingers. "Yes sir." The Wark snorted and meandered away, eyes moving from table to table.

Jack amused himself with a few more shuffling techniques. He hadn't done it in a while, so he wasn't doing anything fancy, but anything to attract people. The problem was someone was having at streak over at the roulette wheel, and there was quite a crowd of players and watchers. Jack stared at their backs and wondered who was winning big.

"Why hello there," said a familiar voice, and Jack turned to the right side of his horseshoe table to glance at the cigarette girl leaning her tray on the edge there. The hands settled on the straps that secured the box to her front, looping up over the back of her neck. It was a nice journey for the eyes, to go up those arms and linger on the naked skin and the straps and how they brushed against the breasts, up the shoulders to the black curled Betty Page hair until Jack settled on the face and—

Gwen Cooper smiled and winked, and it wasn't a secret "Hey, TORCHWOOD!" wink. It was a flirty wink.

"Why hello," he said, drawing out the 'oohhhhh' part and leaning on his table with one hip as he turned to her and absently shuffled the cards. Gwen's hands idly organised her cigarettes as if she was making up excuses to rest there. Jack hadn't known that she was going to be in here, and it would have been nice to have had a heads up. "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"

Gwen smiled at him and shrugged. "Girl's gotta eat," she said, done with her organising and instead choosing to run her fingers up and down the red leather straps of her box. Jack stepped back to give her an obvious once over, and it was for show, but also because _damn_.

Married, Harkness. This one was married and he _liked_ her husband.

"Nice hat," he said instead, pointing to her little red pillbox hat.

She shifted from one hip to the other, the red satin shorts shimmering when she did, literally straining at the seams, and her cleavage moved in the tight waistcoat that served as a top. It was a miracle of physics that she wasn't falling out the sides. He thought about all that carpet tape Dee had complained about and wondered if Gwen was using the same thing, and what it would feel like to be peeled off that skin. If she sweated, the adhesive would come undone and then—

"So, what's going on over there?" he asked, nodding his head towards the crowd still _oohing_ and _aaaahing_ over the action at the roulette table. Jack could hear the clicking of the wheel and the soft barks from the croupier. Now he wanted to be the croupier instead of standing over here at an empty table, shuffling cards and staring at the half-exposed breasts of a married woman who happened to be his boss.

Nah.

"Some woman in a Versace dress played a maximum hit," Gwen told him, "Won the whole payout, then she split and threw it back, lost half and then just maxed again."

Jack whistled. "Someone has good luck, or a head for math." Go Dee.

Gwen smiled. "Have you been here long?"

"Nope. Just started. You?"

Gwen made a non-committal noise. "So you haven't had the full tour?"

Jack shrugged. "They put me right to work. But I guess I'll get in back later when I'm on break." _Translation: I haven't had a chance to snoop around yet, but I will later._

She batted her eyelashes at him and twirled a sellophane-wrapped cigar in between two fingers and he thought she was about to do some horrid Edward G Robinson impression when they were interrupted.

"Oi, you don't get paid to chat," the Wark mumbled, returning to Jack's table. "And you," he slapped a meaty palm on Gwen's arse and her eyes widened as she jumped. Jack could see her hands reflexively clench the cigarette box. "Move that arse."

Gwen stared at Jack for just a moment longer, and he watched the rage fly through those big doe eyes before she blinked it away, shrugged a little to let the tension out. It couldn't have lasted longer than two seconds. She sauntered away, as if it didn't bother her, men groped her arse all the time, and then, and _then_ she tossed that coifed hair over her shoulder and looked back at them, and gave her hips a little shake.

Oh man, married married, married, Harkness. _Married._

They watched her stop and she bent at the waist to sell a package of Superkings to some man who apparently needed to complete the transaction with his eyeballs in her cleavage. Jack leant against the edge of the table and shuffled the cards in a bridge, which gave him something else to look at other than to trace the seam that ran from Gwen's heel up the back of her calves and all the way to Dixieland, probably.

"I could break my dick off in 'at," the Wark said.

Jack thought about the logistics of that, knowing what he knew about what was in the Wark's trousers, and bit back a little bit of revulsion. Still, it was hard to ignore the crease the hotpants made under the cup of her bottom when she straightened, the heels arching her back and pushing her arse out a little. "Yeah," he mumbled, not really thinking about it.

The Wark slammed a hand on his shoulder, and it was heavy, and smelt like cheese. "Keep your 'ands off the 'oofmeat," he warned. And then he lumbered away, dragging his knuckles on the tacky casino carpeting.

"I would like to state for the record," Ianto said, amused. "I also 'could break my dick off in that', as long we're talking about a metaphorical breaking."

Jack smiled at the couple that came to his table and broke a new deck. "Hi there! Sit down! Starting bet is a ten pound minimum."

* * *

 

"That new dealer, I don't like 'im," Sebastian said as he came through the Employees Only door. "'E smells like a copper."

Lionel stroked his chin and played with the video feeds using a small stick. "I don't remember hiring a new girl," he mused. "You would think that I'd remember banging a piece of arse like that." What he didn't want to say aloud was that things were starting to fall into place and he didn't like the puzzle. On the other hand, just because one didn't like something didn't mean that it wasn't happening, right? Missing nephew, new dealer, new waitress. Huh.

"Do you want me to toss 'er?" Sebastian asked, squinting at the black and white screens.

Lionel waited until Archibald joined them and licked the screen, as if it could tell him something about their new players. Lionel rewound some of the footage and watched John Hanson flirt shamelessly, his smile only for the girl, who shook her breasts in a way that Lionel might have found entertaining if he wasn't interested for other reasons.

Really, he'd remember a bit of human tail like that. And if that wasn't reason enough to be suspicious, look at the way the man deferred to her, just a very little. Most dealers would have tried to put their hands places.

There were some occupations in which being a nice guy stood out, and working in an underground casino was one of them, actually.

Of course, he wasn't John Hanson from Omaha Nebraska, as the photocopy of his driver's license said. That was actually what all of this hinged on. It was an impeccable forgery, but no point in having it when people could recognise you.

"I think 'e's gay," Sebastian said. "'E didn't make a move on 'at gel when she was over there."

"Maybe he was scared," Archibald suggested. "He ain't never seen one of us before, tonight, right?"

"Oh, gentlemen, please tell me that you recognise that man," Lionel chuckled. "Everyone should recognize that man."

He tossed the photocopy of the man's driver's license down on the table and they peered at it.

"Is he a film star or summat?"

Lionel's gills flared with irritation. "No, you idiot, but that woman is his boss."

Warks as a rule weren't very intelligent, but Archibald wasn't doing his species any favours tonight. "She's his pimp?"

"Torchwood, you idiot, Torchwood." Lionel pinched his tip spines in between his thumbs and index fingers and twisted them, so that they pulled the muscles on the top of his skull. He had a headache. "That's Jack Harkness. So that has to be Lady Torchwood. Here. In our establishment."

They'd probably got to Nigel or something. Or found one of the bodies. He was going to have to monitor the way the Warks disposed of those things. Sometimes they were very literal.

"Oh," Archibald said, and then blinked. "She has nice tits."

Lionel turned to Sebastian. "They're going to want in the back, sooner or later. Just let them come in." He looked at the screen when Harkness turned to the newcomers at the table, already dealing the cards. "He can stand to make the house a few more quid in the meantime."

* * *

 

The stakeout was going well. They'd already eaten their way into a sugar high and now they were rattling around in the van, playing Mario Kart on one of the unused monitors with cordless steering wheels Maggie had made from something.

The feeds were boring. For an hour they'd listened to Gwen sell cigarettes, cigars, and apparently breath mints to all manner of people and creatures. There was also some grunting, and a mumbled comment from Gwen that sounded like, 'You put your hand there one more time, mister, and I'll show you the meaning of _mumble mumble_ '.

Dee was so quiet that they almost didn't remember who was wearing the wire. She had sat at a table and placed her bets, and she didn't speak unless she was saying something like 'red eighteen' or 'doubledown.' She'd ordered a Bloody Mary, but there was no way of knowing if she'd drunk it. Lois was guessing that one was a big fat no. Dee just wasn't the kind of person who drank on the job. Apparently, though, she was making a lot of money, and Lois wondered if they were going to actually cash in chips.

No of course not. This night could only end one way, really: running and screaming and shooting, and anyone in this van who argued differently needed to have their Skittles taken away.

Speaking of hyperactive, Jack was worse to listen to, because he just. Didn't. Shut. Up. Dee had been right. When Captain Harkness wanted to lay on the charm, he could _lay on the charm_ , like double clotted cream on a scone.

On the other hand, that was his job right now, so Lois wasn't going to hold being chatty against him. Then there had been the little conversation with Gwen, and somewhere in there, after Jack had started up the game with some new players, Gretchen had gestured at the monitor labelled 'Jack' and waved her licorice in an air circle.

"D'you think he and Gwen ever…" She blinked at them, and made a fist, then pumped it back and forth a few times. "You know."

Lois was about to tell her to shut up, but then she realised that it was a legitimate question. "I don't know. I don't think so."

"When would she have?" Maggie said around a mouthful of Skittles. "She's been with Rhys forever."

"That didn't stop her from hitting skins with Owen," Gretchen said, opening a new bag of American Red Vines while they both stared at her. "What? Owen hid a lot of things in his medical files, people."

Lois tried to think about that. Okay, so Gwen and Owen had been a thing. Had a thing. What was it with people in Torchwood sexing each other up? Were they all going to end up having sex? She looked at Maggie and Gretchen with a new eye. Oh well, if it happened, it happened.

Jack had made a funny joke about something that he called 'sex pollen' once and Gwen had thrown something at him.

"Jack and Ianto were a couple, though, weren't they?" she said suddenly and Gretchen and Maggie glanced at her. Lois looked at the blank screens, and Mario Kart on pause on the left and considered it. "I mean, it's obvious that whatever was going on there was…"

Maggie put her feet up on the console and picked through her handful of Skittles for all the red ones. "He talks to him, you know," she said. "Have you guys heard it?"

Gretchen shook her head. "No, really? That's mental."

Maggie shrugged. "I dunno. I suppose he's lonely." Gretchen examined her fingernails. Lois shoveled a handful of M&Ms in her mouth and looked elsewhere. Maggie just turned up the volume on Dee's feed. "She's still winning, I think."

* * *

 

She was thinking of killing Donatella Versace. Or whomever was designing for Atelier these days. Or Gretchen, who had helpfully glued parts of the dress onto her body. She would have killed Harkness, who took the opportunity to place his hands in places that she might have considered romantic if he hadn't been hiding a firearm, but alas, as she knew from experience, it didn't stick. And also, she had to make up for all the previous times before she could start doing it again.

She had to grudgingly admit that the way he'd strapped that Derringer to her inner thigh was genius, and she couldn't have got that thing on without him. On the other hand, she hadn't needed his teasing face when he brushed her delicate bits and whispered the words, "Oh, sorry, no-no bad place."

Lois had rented a car to drop her off in style and she'd arrived about an hour earlier, flashed her chip at the door and made for the tables as quickly as possible. The dress had turned out to be a little bit of overkill, but not out of the realm of possibility. This wasn't Monte Carlo, but what she had learnt over the years is that one rarely overdressed when it came to design—if a person didn't know haute couture, it was easy for them to assume you picked up your frock at 'that nice shop over by H&M'.

The roulette wheel was almost complete chance. Of course it was mostly playing one in thirty-seven odds, sometimes less, but it wasn't something you could control, and so she figured winning at it would be impressive enough to get her into the special games fairly quickly. And if she was terribly unlucky but kept throwing money at the problem it was just as likely. All in all, she had a better chance of getting into the back than she did winning big at the wheel, statistically speaking.

Which didn't account for the fact that she'd just won the maximum hit twice in the past fifteen minutes.

The house brought her another Bloody Mary even though she hadn't finished the last one; the ice had melted in the glass, so they replaced it. That was service. Also, she was sure they wanted their twenty grand back.

It was boring, and Cooper never came to sell her cigarettes (she had been looking forward to that, even planned to put one of these hundred pound chips in her cleavage), and she had an itch for one. She hadn't smoked in years, but the man next to her was chain-smoking what looked to be American Marlboro Reds, and the smell, while not remotely enticing usually, worked with the atmosphere and the ambiance and general _je ne c'est eugh_ of a dimly-lit gambling establishment that tried to be upscale but was giving itself away with its Vegas carpets.

Eventually, she signalled the valet to carry her winnings to the holding pen in the cash-out box and kept a small tray for herself, abandoned her drink (another one that she wouldn't do more than sip would materialise next to her no matter where she went anyway) and sauntered about, looking for another game. Something that would indicate to her hosts that she wasn't just lucky, but clever as well. And…

She sat at the table and set her tray down to the side on the felt with a click. The dealer didn't see her at first because he was busy making a payout to a suave gentleman in a bad tux, all poor material and too large shoulders and too long sleeves (rented). She folded her hands under her chin and waited as he flirted a little bit, so she was ready when he finally turned to deal her in.

Okay, a split-second face waver, she deserved that, since she'd just rather slipped in there.

She slid her ten-pound chip onto the box and blinked. A cocktail waitress brought her a drink. Harkness grinned widely and did an arc shuffle that meant he'd been practicing. Or he was just good at sleight of hand still. An amusing thought to file away for later gnawing.

"Why hello there," Harkness said, dealing her in with three other gentlemen. "What's a dame like you doing in a place like this?"

She gave him a smile. "Gambling."

Harkness peeked at his cards and hit himself, then administered the next round of cards. Dee let him hit her. Pair of nines. She split the hand and he hit her again. Ace and a four. Stand on the first, hit on the second. This game was fucking easy.

 

The man next to her got natural twenty-one. Fuck. She sipped her Bloody Mary and tossed her chips in the betting box.

Three wins and a few surrenders later, the man next to her had shoved off for greener (luckier) pastures, and the two on the other end slumped over their drinks, faces almost in the felt. Her chips had overflowed the box and spilled onto the felt just in front of her next to the table rail. She sat back in her chair and tapped the table.

Harkness hit her. "So, milady, where are you from?"

She blinked and used her glass to hide her mouth as she glanced at the Warks in the corner, watching the table with interest. "London."

Harkness stood and dealt her another hand. Twenty-three. She hadn't been paying attention. "Oooh, slumming it over here on our side of the country."

She shrugged her shoulders, leaning forward. "You're awfully forward, Mister…" she made a show of reading his nametag. "John." He smiled like a toothpaste commercial and tilted his head as he dealt. "Besides, how does an American end up here?"

Harkness dealt her and one of the remaining people in. "I flew," he said cheerfully, "and between you and me, boy are my arms tired."

She split her bet and doubled down, and when her cards were all laid, it was abysmal. "You're distracting me on purpose," she grumbled, watching her chips disappear into the house box.

Harkness smiled again, and it wasn't remotely friendly, and a horrible tell. "I'm aloof," he said, "cool under pressure. I lie for amusement and not necessit—"

"Hit me," she snapped.

"With pleasure."

Twenty-one. She smiled and sat back when he bent to shove the chips to her. "That's more like it."

When he glanced at her, the smile was plastic, plastered on. "Whatever you say, milady."

At that minute, one of the Warks walked over and pulled Harkness back by the shoulder. Dee uncrossed her legs and set her hands in her lap. She was back to nearly pulling guns from out of her legs again. How reminiscent. She sipped her drink and made herself put it down. It was going too fast, and she didn't want to get drunk, buzzed or even very relaxed. Not here. She'd go home from all this and make a pitcher of caesars. She was supposed to be off this weekend.

Yeah, that was going to happen.

Around her, the slot machines jangled and sang little tunes. They were so very complicated these days—Maggie would have a field day—with touch screens and buttons and instructions on the front. Whatever happened to 'insert coin, pull lever'? Everything was faster, brighter, louder. She'd be resentful if she wasn't also painfully aware that in her line of work she relished items that were faster, brighter and louder.

The Wark whispered something in Harkness's ear and pressed something small into his hand. He peered at it and the Wark said something additional that he must not have liked, because his eyes flicked to Dee's and he grimaced.

She made a bet with herself that this was her 'invitation' to the back room. And as the Wark walked away and Harkness turned the item over in his hand, she split and doubled down.

"This is for you," Harkness said, setting the chip in front of her, his eyes unreadable. "An invitation to the back of the house, where they hold our more…high stakes games."

Bingo. Dee took the chip and looked at it. It was a great deal like the one they'd pulled off their corpse and which she used to get in, but it was slightly larger and green. "How lovely for me, I'm sure," she murmured, turning it over in her fingers. This close to her nose, it reeked of something. Formaldehyde?

Harkness winked at her and grinned, breaking a new deck and tossing the old one. "Well-played, milady."

She picked up her chip box, nodded at him, and turned to leave.

"Hey," he called after her, "don't let it get to your head."

She rolled her eyes and followed his pointing finger back to the Wark who stood against the far wall of the casino. Her palms were a little sweaty. They hadn't been like this in ages. It was hard to tell why: nerves, possibly; anticipation, surely; fear? Well, that could be in there. She wouldn't discount it. Still, she realised as she followed the Wark through a set of gilded double doors, she wasn't afraid of the thing in front of her. It had to be something else.

* * *

 

Lois threw her controller down in disgust. "You're cheating!"

Gretchen turned her katamari on the screen without looking away. "Look, you're allowed to ram me, I'm allowed to ram you."

"You picked me up!" She pointed at the monitor, where her little character was sticking out of the ball Gretchen was rolling about, its little legs waving wildly.

"I'm allowed to do that. You were too slow."

Lois glanced at Maggie, who was monitoring the feeds with one of the headphones pressed to her ear. "These games are rubbish."

"Oh come off it," Gretchen said, rolling over a sumo wrestler with her ball. " _KONSUGAS!_ " she yelled at the screen. "Besides," she continued, "if we were playing something like, oh, speed Tetris, you'd be kicking my arse." The screen was filled with screaming people as she rolled over what looked like a school ceremony. "I'm just better at picking things up."

Maggie didn't look at them, but Lois heard her mutter. "I'll say."

* * *

 

The back room was actually just a nicer version of the front room, which was so disappointing it was almost enough to get her to turn around and leave. There weren't any slot machines, just higher stakes versions of the same table games as up front. More importantly, there was no cigar-smoke filled room with just one light over a lone round poker game, manned by Rickey the Mickey and Joey Popcornface or whomever they were supposed to be. It was still dim, but not the festering secret hole she had been hoping for.

Dee sat at the blackjack table and ante-upped a thousand quid—okay that was a little painful. If she wasn't careful, she could get cleaned out before anything interesting happened. She looked for Cooper here, on the off chance this was where she'd been all night.

The dealer didn't even look at her. She tried not to notice that the cameras were doubled here—this was a lot more money, maybe they had card sharks. That'd be small change in the front room, but back here, a quick brain and cheater could make a pretty pile of cash in short order.

It was easy to lose her money and just keep going. The man next to her jangled his leg and tapped his knee in an irritating way, and the ashtray next to him was half-full, which meant something. You could fill hours with your arse parked in one place, and so she decided to do just that, and a half-hour later she was up exactly fifty pounds. Twenty hands and she was only up fifty pounds. It was pathetic, actually. She started to lose money on purpose, asking to be hit on nineteen and so on.

Because she wasn't here to gamble away Torchwood's petty cash (and really, that this amount of money was designated for petty cash was scandalous; she could buy a mid-range car with it and still have enough left over to do what Maggie would call "ricing it out".). She handed the valet her tray and abandoned her umpteenth drink of the evening and decided that she was tired of waiting around. She couldn't keep doing this.

She pulled one of the cigarette girls aside. "I need to visit the ladies," she said.

The girl had the skills to try to look more stupid and clueless than she was actually nervous about something. "Ladies?"

"You do have one of those facilities back here, correct?" She played along with the dumb-act. Something in the girl's eyes was terrified that Dee wanted to go anywhere. Didn't anyone piss here? "A _toi-let_ ," she said slowly and loudly as if the girl couldn't understand her.

"It's, it's right down the hall. _At the very end of the hall_ ," she emphasized, probably so that Dee wouldn't go stumbling into any of the other rooms whose doors dotted the long hallway. Well, that was practically a road map, wasn't it?

She didn't bother to thank the girl, and the hallway was deserted when she stepped out, as if they didn't want people to linger. She walked as if she knew where she was going, and passed the first door. It was quite close. If they were doing some body-chopping, they'd probably want that saw noise to be well away.

 _If I were an abattoir, where would I be?_

Dee picked the door in the middle of the hallway to the right. On the other side of the hallway was the casino, and equidistant from the loos and the private gaming room. She opened the door slightly and peeked inside.

"Oh. Oh shit."

* * *

 

Gwen's spur-of-the-moment decision to sneak in, squeeze herself into a pair of hot pants and tape her nipples to the inside of a waistcoat was, in retrospect, looking less and less brilliant and more importantly, less and less leader-like. Jack had never gone undercover, and perhaps that had been more of an active decision than a roll of the dice.

Saying 'live and learn' seemed a little preemptive, or at least overly dramatic at this point.

All the girls were tense, and the more Gwen watched, shaking her arse and getting quite a few tips (some were chips slid under the hem of her shorts from behind), the more she understood that it wasn't just the clientele who were nerve-wracking. They were bothersome, sure, but they didn't do more than touch, and it was easy to slap hands away. This wasn't the kind of job where that was supposed to be unacceptable; it'd be like a stripper complaining because she was touching the bloke's legs when she gave a lap dance.

Apropos of the whole female exploitation thing, the girls didn't like going in the back, and they didn't care for the Warks. Who would care for a bunch of handsy bouncers with tusks and spines? Maybe another Wark or something, but Gwen only had to take one look at them to understand that the upper body strength of one of them alone was good enough to bat her around like a paper maché animal.

She checked her watch, glanced over to see that Jack was gone from his table, and a quick scan showed that he hadn't relocated. Break time, then. She hefted her box, and strode purposefully along one of the main aisles for the back room access.

There was a slap to her arse and a "Hey, darling," and she turned to her left, ready to deliver a few choice words and possibly a slap, but when the cigarettes slid in her box, she remembered, oh yeah, that was what she was here for: cancer and a tickle. He was easy to peddle a few Sherman cigarillos to (she hadn't even known what a cigarillo was a few hours earlier; she couldn't say that she hadn't learnt anything in this gig) and then she was on her way. The Wark at the door looked at her and she tapped her watch and pouted. "Ladies," she said, and he waved her away. Hah. They never wanted to know more than that, unless they were into it.

She found the break room easily enough, it was the first door on her left past the ladies, and the hallway, which she had only briefly run through to get to the floor at the beginning of her shift, was long, door-filled, and deserted. She tossed her cigarette box on one of the tables and sighed, rubbing her shoulders. Jesus, that was backbreaking work. The urge to slump the whole time had been overwhelming, but then she gaped in the front and that was a little more skin than she wanted to show. She groaned a little when she massaged a lump up at the very bottom of her neck into her shoulder.

"Oh man, I hope they give you compensation," said a voice and she jumped, turning. Jack raised his hands in a surrender gesture, then looked at her chest. "Watch where you're pointing those—"

"Not in the mood," she warned him. "This was a bloody stupid idea."

Jack made a show of adjusting his bowtie. "I don't know, I think you got the better end of the deal. This thing is like a noose." He grimaced. "I don't know how—"

He stopped suddenly, like he didn't want to say it.

"Ties are an acquired taste," Ianto said to Gwen as he leant against the ancient and unplugged vending machine in the room.

Gwen ignored him. It. "Have you made any progress? Seen Dee?"

Jack looked at the choices in the vending machine then pulled out a handful of change. "Yeah," he said, rifling through the coins in his hand. "Twiglets. I've missed Twiglets."

"And?" she said, giving up on telling him that the Twiglets were likely five years old and just plugging the machine in. The lights in it flickered, and she caught Jack's ghost face in the Plexiglas window.

"Oh, she's in the back room," Jack said. "Got a glance in there earlier, but it's pretty dim. Lots of smoke and tables." He inserted his coins. "A….five." The spiral turned and the Twiglets advanced and fell, only to get caught on a melted and bent forward Curly Wurly and wedge in between the glass and the wrapper. "Aw."

Gwen put her hands on her hips. "Jack Harkness, are we backup or not?"

Jack was in the middle of trying to shake the machine when he finally glanced at her. "Yeah. Well I am. _You_ are supposed to be with the girls." He paused and turned to her. "Where are the girls?" he asked her and she narrowed her eyes. "Ladies? Team? Other people wot we work with who happen to have br—"

"They're in the van, listening to everything you just said. _remember_?"

He made the 'yikes!' face and then bent close to her cleavage, as if he needed to be near the mike and also as if he wasn't wearing one of his own. Opportunist. "I am sorry, ladies."

"Yes, well," Gwen said then, tugging on the bottom of her waistcoat and regretting it as it just pulled at the tape inside and in turn yanked her breasts down. She left the breakroom and then paused. "I suppose we can have a bit of a shufti. Which way, do you reckon?"

Jack blinked at her. "Uh, left?"

She glanced down the hallway at the long corridor of doors. How did they even get a corridor like this in a warehouse? She was all turned about, what with the layout of this place. She blamed the sickening carpets.

"All right." She pointed right. "That's the casino. That's the loo. That's the other casino down there." She pointed over Jack's shoulder at the open break room door. "And that's Twiglet-land. So what do you reckon, one of these leads to a basement?"

Jack thought about it. "A warehouse with a basement sounds redundant."

"Point." She sighed. "All right, we'll start with—"

The doors to the casino proper burst in, and one of the Warks raised a gun. "Start with put'in yer 'ands where I c'n see 'em."

Jack flipped his hands up and Gwen followed suit. This would have been a good time to use the firearms that Jack must have had on his person, and with which they probably should have armed themselves before they left the break room. 'Live and learn' was looking less and less plausible.

"Ja—" she started to hiss, but the Wark fired off a shot in the hallway and it resonated. She flinched and Jack moved in front of her a little. Any other time she might have protested, but this was agreed upon protocol that they'd worked out years ago: Jack took the bullets sometimes, and that was just the way it was. Gwen said it was shoddy work. Jack called it a necessity. Ianto had called it 'an appropriate allocation of resources'. Regardless, now was not the time to argue about old policy making a comeback. They could address it later.

"'Arkness," the Wark said, gesturing with the gun. "This thing will punch righ' through you, it will. So 'ands on your 'eads, abou' face, an' 'ead righ' for that secon' door on th' left."

She slid her hands along her hair an up her skull, lacing her fingers on the top as Jack turned towards her, doing the same, mashing the spikes on the top of his head.

"Hey," he said, "he called me 'Arkness', like Noah."

"Not now," she said. The banter distraction wasn't going to work, not whilst they were aligned like this. What she wanted to say was that they knew his name. And if they knew his name, then it was probable that they knew Torchwood, and that meant they were one step ahead of her and Jack and the team.

She about faced and walked to the door, which opened before she got there and one of the other Warks, the _extremely_ dumb one, was standing there with another firearm. They were double-teamed.

She walked into the room and glanced about as quickly as possible to begin to figure out an escape plan. Tables, a bunch of machinery whose purpose was not clear, and some bodies whose purpose was fairly obvious, from the way they were being gutted like freshly killed deer.

The Wark pushed her a little bit, and then one of his huge hands came down like a bowling ball on her shoulder, and she was forced to her knees. When they were yanking her arms behind her back and cuffing her, she heard Jack grunt as he fell to her right, getting the same treatment, no doubt. They hadn't patted either of them down, and that was sloppy, but she wasn't about to mention it.

Not that she could hide anything under this get-up.

It was all up to Dee, then, she thought as she turned to look at the figure on her left.

Dee rolled her eyes and her shoulders, but that last bit was probably because the cuffs were hurting her wrists. "I told you he was too recognisable for undercover work."

* * *

 

"So the mikes are just off," Gretchen said around a licorice whip. "Is that an accident?"

Maggie set her bag of Skittles on the side of the console and fiddled with the keyboard and a few dials. Lois paperclipped her bag of M&Ms shut and tucked them into her purse.

"Well, I can't imagine they decided to do it on purpose," Maggie snapped. "Dee's went out and I thought she'd just broken the wiring in the dress, but now…" She sat back and tapped her fingers on the console, brow furrowed.

"They could be malfunctioning."

"What, all three within five to ten minutes of each other? Two at almost the same time? I don't think so."

Gretchen binned her licorice. "Inferior tech, then."

Maggie gave her a death glare. "My tech isn't inferior. This is human error or interference."

Gretchen waved her fingers in jazz hands. "I'm just saying that you might want to consider…no, I can't even argue with this." She glanced at the monitors. "This is too coincidental. They've been made."

Lois looked at the blank feed lines and the insides of the van, and the camera view of the front of the warehouse. She checked the cameras that showed all angles of approach to the van and sat back. They couldn't just sit here. "If they're in trouble, we should—we have to do something," Lois said. "That's what we do."

Maggie cocked her head. "We could go in, guns blazing."

"Because we're good at that blazing thing," Gretchen said. "I just qualified three months ago, and your hands shake in the presence of blowfish." Mags flipped her off. "We have to think of something clever. A diversion."

Lois only listened to them with half an ear. She was too busy trying to remember all the things that Dee had stocked for them in here. Non-traditional things that would get past a security pat down. Things like—

"All right," she said, cutting them off as she opened the first armory chest. She handed Gretchen the ceramic mini pistols designed to fit inside a padded bra holster. "Put these on."

Gretchen stared at the leather holster. "What do you expect me to—"

"Don't worry, Chewie," Maggie chirped, sliding a large ring on her finger. "I think I know what she has in mind."

* * *

 

The room was small, smaller than she would have suspected for an operation like this, Gwen thought as she stared at the two dead bodies on the tables, their internal organs being packaged carefully in metal cylinders, brains being excised as they watched. Jack was still minutely struggling against his bonds, and when Gwen glanced at Dee, she was doing something in that head of hers. Probably lining up some sort of strategic shot that she'd execute and break them all out, but she had to wait for the right time.

Gwen yanked against her cuffs. They were standard police issue and the Warks hadn't taken any chances with them and their flexibility, not even the off chance that they would dislocate a thumb and yank a hand through; the metal was pressed flush with her skin, and the kneeling position on the floor wasn't helpful. In the center of the floor like this, they were visible from a three-sixty degree angle, and they couldn't brace themselves against a wall to pick the locks or even jump up quickly and deliver a roundhouse kick like in all the films she watched with Rhys on slow Sunday afternoons. That was what you were supposed to do, right? When your hands were cuffed, you kicked people in the face.

"Or you butt them in the head," Ianto said, sitting on the table with the bodies.

He was an unhelpful dead person.

Jack snorted, and when she stared at him he offered her a shrug. "I was just thinking about headbutting."

She opened her mouth to say something but the blowfish with the saw had turned it off, and she was grateful as ever because the whining had been horrible, not to mention the ever present aural and visual reminder that he was taking the top of someone's skull off and she was just sitting there watching. Sure they were dead, but there were some things that just shouldn't be done.

It seemed as if the Warks were the muscle and the blowfish was the one in charge, and part of Gwen's head sang, 'Of _course_ he is.' The Wark had hustled them in here at gunpoint, and that Jack had gone along with it at all suggested to her that he was sure the Wark would have shot her if he had tried something. The blowfish had been waiting with Dee, and Gwen didn't even know what the story was there. But it couldn't have been good.

Dee sighed. "This is one of those times when I think about what I _used_ to do for a living," she told Gwen.

"Bury people in concrete and blow things up?"

"Admit it, both of those things would be useful right now."

Gwen glanced at the saw and the blowfish pulling the brain from the skull and setting it in a glass canister. "Yeah, would do."

After the second brain was bottled, canned, contained, whatever, the blowfish finally turned to them, wiping his hands with a damp cloth. He pulled off his butcher's apron and she shook her head at his natty suit. Brown and blue pinstripes favoured no man.

"You know what I love about humans, aside from your gambling fetish and of course, the advent of the jelly baby?" he said finally, his speech not unlike someone trying to unlearn a bad accent and try on something from a higher class and failing just a little bit. "TV tropes dot com."

Gwen looked at Jack and he shrugged.

"Oh yes, this is the part where I tell you all about my dastardly plan, because I am sure that you will never escape." He smiled. "And then there's the part where the villain says that they won't tell you about their dastardly plan because that's like a bad telly show or film."

Dee groaned, and it wasn't from pain. The blowfish crouched down in front of them, but woefully out of headbutting-distance, Gwen noted. Damn.

"I like to subvert the paradigm, so let's throw caution to the wind, shall we?" He flattened his hand on his chest. "I'm Lionel. Like the trains. Odd, as I have never been on a train."

Gwen just glared.

Lionel shrugged. "You don't have to introduce yourself, you know. Like in the films, I'm a smart villain, so I know your name." He winked when he stood. "Gwen Cooper, Lady Torchwood."

Any other time she might have laughed at Lady Torchwood. And then considered it. On the other hand it sounded like a porn star name.

Lionel turned away from them and returned to the canisters, waving one of the Warks over, dragging a larger cylinder, into which Lionel carefully lowered the first glass brain case inside.

"I admit, she was not who I expected to see when that door opened," Lionel said. "Took you two a damn sight longer to find the room than I had thought it would." He smiled at Dee. "However, it was almost poetic, that the one person I hadn't suspected was the first one to show. All ducks lining up."

Jack laughed and Gwen glanced at him. She shrugged, and she wondered if he'd snapped or was drunk. "Ducks," he offered.

The machinery in the corner began to hum, so she paid it attention in earnest, taking in the thin ring on the floor and the pole that rose vertically from one side of it, roped with cables welded to the end of the pole was another ring, this time a little thicker, but laden with bits and bobs of tech and chips like the world's nerdiest Christmas wreath. A cable ran from the bottom ring to a large generator that let out a high-pitched whine as it started up.

"Is that what I think it is, Lionel?" Jack asked as he peered at the ring, all seriousness and a bit of irritation. Gwen watched the tech on the ring spark.

Lionel closed the metal case around the second brain jar and wiped his hands on a rag. "I am most sure that it is what you think it is, Captain Harkness."

Gwen stared at the ring, in the air, which seemed to be filling with something. That Lionel had known Jack's name had been less concerning than the filling emptiness contained in the metal. "That's…"

"A hole in the Rift," Lionel said. "Convenient, since these things go stale so quickly, I'm told." He hefted the canister and patted the side of it.

Gwen looked at Dee, but she just stared impassively. Something was going through her skull, but she wasn't sharing. Jack was easier to parse because he was a talker, and well, he was just easier to parse.

"That's a Rift manipulator?" she asked.

Jack sighed. "People are always tearing holes in the Rift," he admonished. "Some day that's gonna stain."

Lionel held up one webbed hand and made a tiny measurement with his thumb and forefinger. "Just a tiny one. Big enough for—"

The Rift hole solidified, or rather, finished filling the ring, and the inside of it was a black void laced with red striations. Gwen wondered if this was what the Rift looked like or if this was a manifestation of emptiness, of space and time being bent. Maybe it was more and her eyes couldn't see it, couldn't fathom it.

Just then an object sailed out of the Rift, and it clattered to the floor a few feet away, a metal box that steamed as the dumb Wark reached down to gingerly pick at the latches. The hinged lid came up, and he must have liked what he saw, because he nodded at Lionel.

"It's all here."

Lionel paused and stared at Gwen, and then Dee. "I was thinking that I'd sell more than just these two tonight, but none of you fit the bill, you know." He shoved the canister into the Rift hole, and it reminded Gwen of those old inter office communication systems where plastic cylinders flew through a pressurized air tubing system in the walls. "None of you are addicts, and that's what they like, all that dopamine without the drug addiction."

The canister disappeared and Gwen watched Lionel accept the other boxes filled with organs and push them through the Rift hole. "So all these people are gambling addicts," she guessed.

"And you get them in the backroom where all the high stakes are, and you wind them up," Dee said. "I knew it was way too easy to win back there."

Lionel shot her with a finger gun. "You, I admit, I didn't see coming." He frowned. "Though I should have, shouldn't I? I mean, the very fact that I _shouldn't have_ seen you coming means that you should have been clear as day. Or maybe that means that no matter what I did, how much I looked at you, I _wouldn't_ have seen you for what you were." He cocked his head. "It's intriguing."

"It's dull," Jack said. "Dee, you're a great liar."

"Thank you," Dee said.

"I'd lie with you any—"

"Stop, please."

Lionel watched the exchange with his arms crossed. The two Warks, as far as Gwen could tell, were paid to keep silent unless otherwise indicated.

"None of you, not even your nameless counter part here, has a brain that fits the requirements of my gourmands on the other side," Lionel said.

"I know when to hold 'em, and I know when to fold 'em," Jack said, and Gwen rolled her eyes.

"Are you high?" she hissed at him, and he just shrugged. Maybe making Jack a team member had been a bad idea. When he didn't have to be in charge, he was rather silly at inopportune times. 'Live and learn' was becoming more like, 'If we get out of this, there are things that need to be addressed'. She was making a mental list.

"On the other hand, I can't very well let you out of here. Brains are _in_ on the intergalactic foodie market, and I've been cashing in with this crop. Do you have any idea what I could get if I put an immortal's brain on the market?" Lionel crooned. "I don't either, but I'm willing to bet that it's quite a bushel of ducats."

"Oh god, he said 'ducats'," Jack groaned, rolling his eyes.

"If I cut it right out of your skull and waited, would it grow back?" Lionel tapped on the top of Jack's head. "Could I grow two of you?"

Jack smiled at Gwen. "Often imitated, never duplicated," he said to the blowfish. Gwen could tell by the way his shoulders were jerking back and forth that he was trying something with his cuffs, and she wanted him to be able to get out of them.

"For fuck's sake Harkness," Dee groaned, "don't you ever fucking shut up?" She glanced at Lionel. "Are you hiring? Because I've had about enough of this crap, and if it will keep me from turning into one of those empty shells there, I will gladly put a bullet in both of them for you."

Gwen stared at her, but on her other side she heard Jack snort. "Now _that_ is something we _all_ should have seen coming."

Even as Lionel stood Dee up and looked into her unreadable eyes, Gwen couldn't help but think that if this was for real it was all Jack's fault. She was going to kill him. Really.

* * *

 

"Okay, so—" Gretchen waved as Maggie went around the back of the warehouse. "The plan is to get taken to the back room, the secret place, the place where all the shite goes down, as quickly as possible, right?"

Lois looked at the bouncer standing outside the door with his arms crossed. "Right." This had been one of those plans that smelled too much like dramas on the telly, bad Hollywood films and possibly a children's cartoon. That it was even happening to her in real life was a mystery. That she was playing along was inevitably hilarious, or it would be when it was all over. That she had the sneaking suspicion that it was all going to work, despite that it was a cliché was even stranger. She recalled the phrase, 'Truth is stranger than fiction', and then remembered Jack finishing a funny story the other day by saying, 'It's true I swear, I couldn't make this stuff up.'

Well, apparently, not only could you make it up, but you could live a television trope.

"Well, why don't we just walk up and punch the bouncer? That'll get us in."

Lois gave it thought. "Actually, I think that will just get us shot while we're still outside the club. I think we have to wait until we're inside the club before we let ourselves get caught." She checked the thin stab vest under her shirt one more time; it had not magically lost its velcro strapping. The wire skeleton for the electro whip she was going to smuggle in was laced throughout the vest and would slide out and activate with one tug. Maggie had told her repeatedly that they only had one, and that was Maggie code for, 'If you lose this, I'll kill you.'

Gretchen sighed. "Okay, well Dee took our chip, so unless you want to give him a quick handjob, or have access to a blowdart gun…" she paused when she saw Lois's face. "What?"

Three minutes later, Gretchen deliberately added a sway to her walk and clicked her heels on the cement as she neared the front door, and the bouncer looked at her, unimpressed. Lois thought this would have gone easier if Gretchen could distract him more. Then again, if he was so easily distracted then he probably wouldn't have been picked for this job in the first place.

Still, Gretchen showed off her cleavage and cocked her head and was able to get him to turn enough that Lois could get behind him. One touch with the taser from the van and he was down. It was all too easy.

"Do you ever have the feeling that we're inside a Bill and Ted film?" Gretchen asked her.

Lois gave the matter thought as they stared at the unconscious bouncer. "I'm starting to become suspicious of it," she mumbled. She yanked the door open and peered inside for another sentry, but the coast was clear. "Let's go."

The main casino was just what she had thought it would be: slot machines, cigarette smoke, noise noise noise, so much of it that she was surprised that they hadn't heard it from outside. She blinked in the dim light and waited for her eyes to adjust.

 

"What should we do?" Gretchen yanked her to the side and they hid in a shadow, trying not to look conspicuous as they cased the joint. Jesus, _cased the joint_. "Should it be a police raid thing?" she whispered.

Lois thought about it as she stared at the dizzying carpet. Oh, don't stare at the carpet. "No, because that's sure to either cause a stampede or get us shot." She blinked. "I don't fancy being shot."

Gretchen adjusted her guns one more time by groping herself and then steeled her shoulders. "Right then, only one other option." She faced the room, took in a deep breath, and spread her arms wide. _"REPENT, SINNERS! I HAVE A MESSAGE FROM THE LORD YOUR GOD!"_

* * *

 

Gwen was still seething as she watched Dee rub her chafed and yet unlocked wrists and stand in the center of the room, staring absently at the Rift hole.

"If this were a film," Lionel said, "You would double cross me."

Dee frowned. "Then we're quite lucky this isn't a film."

Lionel wasn't finished. Gwen was pretty sure that he thought he was very smart and he liked to hear himself talk, obviously. "But since we all know this isn't a film, then we aren't expecting a double cross because we know better, so this would be a good time to double cross someone, since they aren't expecting it."

Dee blinked. "I just like shooting things," she said finally.

Gwen wasn't sure if they were doomed or not. "Dee, whatever it is, we can get round it." Dee cut her a glance and accepted the firearm from Lionel.

Jack looked at Gwen. "The iocane powder is in both the cups. Remember that."

"We'll take the internal organs and bundle them off. No one cares where they come from. Trash her skull, or send it through. I'm sure someone can use it." Lionel directed the Wark (re: dumb one) to pull them to their feet, and Dee pulled the slide back on the weapon, inspecting the chamber. "The Captain we'll keep in back, just in case he blossoms into a more fruitful tree."

Jack nodded his head. "Lay on, MacDuff." Gwen desperately tried to glance at his wrists to know whether or not he'd succeeded in picking them or something. He had cufflinks, and if he was any kind of con man, surely he knew how to pick handcuffs with earwax and packaging string.

Dee cocked her head and looked at the Rift hole, still swirling on the corner. "Are you going to do this now? While that thing is still open?"

Lionel smiled. Gwen decided that every dislike she had of blowfish was completely well-founded. "By all means, dear, but no headshots." He shrugged. "But should you change your mind, Sebastian is here to lay you out like all the rest." The slightly smarter Wark with the bad accent cocked his gun and pointed it at Dee's head.

"Oh, a vote of confidence," Dee mumbled.

"Insurance. Archibald will finish the job if you feel that you can't."

Dee lifted the gun, but didn't train the muzzle right away. Gwen wondered if she could bring herself to do it, after all these months. She'd once told Dee that she would kill her for this, and part of her wondered if she hadn't sounded her own death knell that day in the café.

Jack blinked. "Hey Dee, do her first. So she doesn't have to watch."

Gwen glared at him. Was everyone going mad?

Dee seemed to make up her mind then, because she nodded at him and raised the gun, pointing it at Gwen. It was odd, how many times she had pointed one of these things, and she didn't often get to see one up close when it was pointed at her.

In that split second, unbidden, the image of Rhys and Duncan came to her, as if wiring in her head was overriding all other things, her ability to think clearly, her ability to analyse, and she saw their faces, smelled Rhys's hair and the soft baby smell of Duncan's skin after a bath. She reminiscently felt a ghost-tug of Duncan's mouth at her breast, and she realised that they might never know what had happened. That morning when she had streaked from the house in the dark had been her last time.

It wasn't enough. It would never have been enough, but this wasn't nearly enough.

Dee stared her in the eyes for a long wavering second. Her hand was rock steady, it was always rock steady really, that was one of her finest features. Too bad her loyalty hadn't been the same.

And then that hand slid the gun quickly to the side until she was aiming at the tech on the Rift hole, and Gwen blinked.

"This," Lionel said, "Was something I _did see_."

"I can fire quite quickly," Dee said, looking at the Rift hole and not at any of them. "Can you say the same for that stellar sack of brain cells?"

"You'll die," Lionel said. "Even if you shoot it, you won't make it out of here alive."

Dee tilted her head. "Intriguing. _Or_ you could let us go and we'll leave. _Or,_ if this were a film, cavalry would arrive before any of us fired at each other." She smiled. " _Or_ his gun could jam and mine could be clear, and I could put a few in this machine and one in your skull. I figure that all of these are equally possible."

Jack laughed. "Don't listen to her. It's all that gambling, gone to her head."

Gwen just waited. Next to her Jack shrugged his shoulders again, and the Wark behind her, Archibald, presumably, shuffled around them a little.

"You daft bitch," Lionel spat, "Do you think this operation ends here? Shut it down. After you're dead, we can always get more."

Dee fired into the machinery of the Rift hole, and it vomited sparks and screeched. "Then put in an order," she mumbled, adding two more bullets.

There was a crash and a series of screams and a few barks of gunfire and Dee turned her head to the door. That was all Lionel needed, and he reached up with one arm and yanked her hand forward to the left, so that she tumbled into him. His fingers dug at her arm and one of his hands closed over hers on the gun, bending her elbow up. Dee made to kick him, but the dress, it was obvious from here, was inhibiting the free movement of her legs. Sebastian started towards them, while Archibald looked to the door just as it burst in, and a body flew in first, like right out of some kung fu film.

Gretchen stood in the doorway, smoke distinctly rising from two holes in—

Jack turned to Gwen. "Her breasts are smoking."

Gwen blinked. "Indeed."

Maggie ran past Gretchen, something large in her hands and she waved it about, hitting Archibald across the face. The Wark soared backwards, into the generator. Something sparked and then something in the Rift machine sparked, and soon they had a little flaming hoop.

Lois sidestepped Gretchen and waved what Gwen thought was Maggie's prototype light whip, catching Sebastian across the shoulders; he let out a shriek when the whip nearly took his arm off. The whip sailed through the air like liquid knives and part of Gwen thought maybe they'd be putting that prototype back on the shelf. She also wished that someone would remember her and Jack in all of this.

Because they had been so very useful.

Dee straddled Lionel and rammed the butt of her pistol into his face; a spine snapped off, flying into the air. Lois uncuffed Gwen, speaking a mile a minute in her briefing voice.

"We hid some of the less scannable weapons on ourselves and then went in the front of the casino. Gretchen screamed a huge speech about Jesus, and then they dragged us back here, where they'd already brought Maggie for sneaking in a side door." Gwen massaged her wrists as Lois moved over to work on Jack's cuffs. "We didn't want to stay all together, you know, just in case you were in two different places."

Lois got his cuffs off and Jack popped his shoulder joints as he and Gwen watched the carnage around them. Lois tossed the cuffs to Dee, who trussed up Lionel and Sebastian, her stiletto all but embedded in Lionel's forehead to discourage movement. Gretchen was using a fire extinguisher on the flaming Rift hole machinery, and in the far corner, Maggie had subdued Archibald, but was still rather animatedly whaling on the unconscious alien's spiny back with what looked to be a foam noodle but was probably a _!!??!?!!_ Death Spear, a weapon that was completely lightweight and could compact itself into a ball that would fit into a poison compartment ring. Like the one Gwen was sure was on Maggie's finger right now.

"Wow," she breathed.

Jack turned to Gwen, rubbing his wrists and grinning. "I love these ladies."

"Women," Lois said as she walked past, a bucket of something sloshing in her hands. Maggie backed off the Wark and collapsed her spear. Gwen gave Jack a critical eye.

"Women," he corrected. Then he yanked off his bow tie and threw it in the finally closing Rift hole.

"Oh that is the nastiest, most foul smelling thing I have ever seen," Gretchen said from behind them. "Save me some."

* * *

 

"What are you doing?" Gwen asked as she joined Jack in the garage bay. She liked the garage, it was large and smelt like petrol and brake fluid and her uncle's garage shop.

"I am admiring your hover car," Jack said, hands in pockets; he really wanted to touch it, she could tell. Gwen smiled as he regarded it with a tilted head. "It's quite sleek. Ianto would'v'e—"

He stopped there, his words as abrupt as snapping a key off in a lock, and Gwen wondered if they would ever be able to open the door on this conversation, whatever the form and shape of it was supposed to be.

"You know, you can talk about him," Gwen said then, wondering if it was she who was keeping this thing from happening.

Jack's hands balled in his pockets, she could see the raised lumps through his trousers, almost as if he knew that she would try to take his hands if he weren't hiding them away. "Not yet. I'm trying to think of something to say. The right thing."

The fluorescent light above them buzzed and went out, blanketing them in the grayscale that came from being lit by lights too far away to be effective. "It doesn't have to be meaningful. At least, not on my account."

Jack didn't reply, just stared at the hover car, lost in thought. Gwen followed his gaze and looked at it herself. It was posh, with its open compartment and red leather seats and the way it bobbed in the air when they powered it on. They still weren't sure how high it could go without losing the gravitational mechanism. Perhaps Jack and Maggie could suss it out.

He rocked on his heels a bit and she saw the corner of his mouth quirk up, eyes focussed on something very far away, in his mind. "Oh, yeah," Jack said into the silence, brain obviously indulging in _something_. Something inappropriate. "Yeah."

Gwen blinked at the bucket seats and ran a gamut of things through the Jack gauntlet in her head. Only one emerged unscathed. "You and Ianto would have shagged in this, wouldn't you?"

"Have you _felt_ the suspension on one of these things?" Jack pulled a hand from his pocket so that he could flatten it out and extend his arm forward like simulating a wave motion. "Smooth."

"I didn't mean to—"

"Someday," Jack said to her, "someday we'll sit down with a coffee and talk about Ianto Jones." He looked at her then, unblinking, squarely in the face. "But not today. Okay?"

They turned then, ambling slowly back to the atrium, out of the garage. "I like your team," Jack said. "They're feisty."

Gwen crossed her arms and bumped his side. "You're one of us now," she reminded him.

"I know. That's why I said feisty." He hummed to himself amusedly, and it was some old show tune that she remembered hearing, something about gambling, of course.

"You have to tell me," she said, "what you thought you were doing, with all the joking about in the warehouse." She glanced at him as he smiled off into space. "Really, it wasn't funny."

Jack looked at her. "You haven't got it yet?"

Gwen frowned. "There was something to get?" She paused, and they strolled past the SUVs, Jack running his fingers over the glossy finish as they passed. "Unless you mean that I now know you are intimately acquainted with _The Princess Bride_."

Jack shrugged, glancing off into the dark as if he had seen something, but it must not have been what he thought it was because he turned back to her. "I was forced to watch it a few times." She must have looked about to ask because he hastily added. "Another time. I'm going to go check on our friend in interrogation. Dee's probably down there showing him how she learnt to use a fish knife in finishing school."

Gwen snorted. "About Johnson—"

Jack waved a hand. "Ah, she'll get over it."

Gwen blinked. "I could fire her, but I—"

"It was smart," Jack interrupted. "Quite clever, really." He shrugged. "She signed on with you, and that's all you need from her."

"You sound like you know."

"I do, yeah." He kicked the access button with the tip of his toe and they stood there whilst the doors cranked open. "And now you do, too." Jack swung an arm about her shoulder. "And that's something."

They strolled though the Hub, powered down for the evening and dark. Full of secrets, it seemed. They hadn't had time to fill it with many yet, anyway.

"Gwen," Jack said jovially, hand squeezing her shoulder. "It was good. It's gonna get better."

Gwen reached up and grabbed his hand, and he let her go, spinning her away from him in some sort of dance maneuver that only he knew so that she was forced to give into his mystery. He danced her to the stairs to the upper level, which was just as well, since she had a few more papers to sign before she was free to go. Going on three in the morning, and here she was, at work.

"What part will get better?" she asked. It was one of those questions she didn't really care if she got an answer for, but said just to be argumentative.

Jack held her hand in his, smiled, closed mouth, then bent to kiss her forehead. Then he backed away, dropping her hand at the last minute before turning and sauntering towards the door to the lower levels, whistling under his breath. She stood on the stair and watched until even the lightness of his blue shirt disappeared into the dark, swallowed by shadows, and all she could hear was his breathless tune, _Luck if you've ever been a lady to begin with, luck be a lady tonight_.

* * *

 

The room smelled like fish and Old Spice. It was not what Dee would have called the best combination, and part of her stomach was signalling that it had a deadline for how long she was allowed to stay in the room before it was going to demonstrate its displeasure.

At least she was out of that dress, now a great deal worse for wear even if one didn't count the massacre Maggie had made of the inside. Her trousers and jumper felt better, plainer, more her. Less frills and greater movement. She sat back in her chair and folded her arms, eyes on Lionel.

"You know you have to explain all this." she said. "You can tell me, or you can tell Harkness, who, when he's not doing his bad stand-up, is actually rather ruthless, or so I'm told." She tried to make her voice as aloof as possible.

No matter how many films he'd seen, Lionel didn't seem to be swayed or intimidated by her anymore, despite that she'd just beaten him senseless not three hours earlier and broken some of the spines on his head. She wondered if they would grow back and figured that there was only one way to find out.

"Do you wager," he asked, "that if I had got to you before they did, this whole thing might have gone differently?"

She ignored him. "You said that there are more. What did you mean by that?"

Lionel smiled. It would have been charming, blowfish or no, if he hadn't been covered in blood and his suitcoat wasn't a messy ripped up thing. "I think it would have." He pulled one of his intact spines. "You've got a merciless streak in you, my dear."

"Torchwood can lock you away until you talk."

"Droll."

"Really, we're not bound by the Geneva Convention."

"I bet that just thrills you right to the bone, doesn't it?" he sneered. "Torchwood holds me here in their luxury POW cells. I quiver with anticipation at the full English breakfast."

Dee leant forward. "What are you afraid of?"

Lionel stopped twisting his spine and then he lowered his hands flat to the table. "This is the part in the film when I tell you that I am more afraid of them than I am of you."

He blinked then, nictitating lenses sliding, just a little tell, really, a little tell that was so deliberate that it couldn't be anything but. A tell that was a tell that wasn't a tell. If she hadn't been gambling all-night she might have had another word for it: fear.

She shoved away from the table. "All right then. You muse on what you think your life will be like in one of our cells indefinitely, and I'll get back to you."

Lionel smiled and wagged a finger at her. "For a split second back there, in the room, I had you, admit it."

Dee stood and abandoned her chair to walk towards the door. "I guess we'll never know, now will we?" she asked.

The door didn't creak ominously, Dee kept all the doors at the Hub highly functional, and she didn't need those sorts of scare tactics to get what she wanted out of an interrogation. But she would have appreciated some ominous noise to clarify her point here. Instead, Lionel called after her.

"You're wasted here, my lovely, simply wasted!"

She shut the door and leant against it, closing her eyes, and when she opened them again, Harkness stood at the end of the hallway, eyes on her. She stiffened, but he just raised his hand, gave her a salute and turned down another corridor.

END

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. [Griswalds](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Firefly#War_Stories): It's a grenade. About the size of a battery, responds to pressure.
> 
> [Extended Scene](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/492357.html#cutid3) and [Ephemera](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/492357.html#cutid4)  
> [Soundtracks](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/492599.html)  
> [Master Post](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/493268.html)


End file.
